Gimme Coffee

We had not heard about Gimme coffee until a friend introduced us to it a month ago. With every cup of gimme coffee we learnt more about it. We heard more, we read more. We realized that it was not just a cup of coffee, it was not just a cafeteria, it was the whole new culture that we were getting absorbed into.

Here’s what it is. Gimme coffee is the neighbourhood coffee place. The first Gimme coffee shop opened at Cayuga Street in Ithaca, Upstate New York in the year 2000. Thereafter, more outlets opened in Ithaca and at Brooklyn and Manhattan in New York city. Soon, this small artisan roastery became a known name as it began to feature in the news. The GQ magazine said: “This is serious stuff, seriously good”. The Forbes Traveller wrote: “Yes, there’s life beyond Starbucks”

So, what made Gimme coffee so good? It’s the roasting, they said. I’m sharing here a link to Gimme Roastery on their website which is an absolute must-read! With this kind of attention being poured into a cup of coffee, it had to be good. They also share with you on their website, information about the farms where the coffee is sourced from on their ‘sustainability’ page where they talk about organic coffees, relationship coffees and so on.

For us, the first cup we experienced was at the Green Street outlet in Ithaca. The following weekend, we were cajoled by our friend into visiting the outlet at Cayuga street. Did we really have to visit Gimme coffee again?! We had only a few weekends in Ithaca and all we seemed to be doing with them was going from one Gimme coffee place to another. But, of course, now we do think it was all worth it! And, it’s not that I have not wanted to share with others our very own ‘chai’ culture which I wrote about earlier at: what is chai

So, while we were at this Cayuga place on the Sunday morning, we looked around us and the place was filled with young people sipping their coffee and browsing the net. In India, we gradually moved over from the ‘Indian coffee shop’ to the ‘Café coffee day’. Actually, not quite. The people who visited the Indian coffee shop were a different generation from the ones who “hang out” at the Café Coffee day. Of course, there’s a few of us who belong to that previous generation who are still around and go to the Café Coffee day as well, for the “conversations” part of the coffee experience although I must say we just can never converse in the midst of all that music and din as effortlessly as the youngsters do these days!

The Café coffee day experience in India is probably more comparable to the Starbucks experience in the American city. Gimme coffee is a bit different. It’s not about “being on the go”. It’s not about “conversations”. It’s more about the coffee. As we waited for our coffee at the Cayuga place, I saw a book on their shelves – ‘Café Life New York: an Insider’s Guide’ It was a book about New York city’s neighbourhood cafes. I browsed through it with great interest and came across these lines about the Gimme coffee: ‘Nobody comes to Gimme coffee for its décor, or its roominess, they come for the excellent coffee’ That said it all.

This reminds me that I have earlier written about the Stolen Coffee room which was really only about the décor because it’s objects from Chor bazaar made it so special. And now, this sharing about the artisan roasted coffee at the neighbourhood café is more about how one experiences a city and imbibes the culture of its people as you walk the streets, spend time at the café and have the opportunity to know experiences that are special to those who live there.

There was always a prelude to our visit to Gimme coffee. A past experience that had to be shared or a story about it’s many flavours, since we were going to be able to sample just a few. There is the 'La Primavera Decaf' coffee with its taste of sweet cocoa, currant and brown sugar and the 'Finca San Luis' which tastes of crisp citrus, grape, apple and peach with an aroma that reminds of orange and fresh florals. This was how deep the experience could go! You could say this was way beyond the real thing, that it was about branding or about romanticizing the experience. Well, whatever it was, we enjoyed it!

And, then there were times when we came back home and continued to talk about coffee! We talked about R.K.Narayan’s essays on coffee and our friend shared this YouTube video about the television sitcom Seinfeld, (another cultural phenomenon in America) and we watched an episode from ‘The Opposite’ on the coffee table book about coffee tables! That was the epilogue that seems to have made the coffee experience totally immortal for us!!

The taste of the coffee lingers on, only this time the aroma ties up with much more because in America it was the coffee lens through which we saw life in the city.

Ithaca Farmers' Market

The week we arrived in Ithaca, the local Ithaca Times carried an article on the Silent movie era and its early days in Ithaca. It said ‘In 1913, Theodore Wharton came to Ithaca to shoot footage of typical college life, he liked the natural beauty of the town with its gorges and its lake and produced over 100 film titles from about 1914 to 1919. This is one of the few original silent film studios in the United States’. However, most people know Ithaca as the place in Upstate New York where Cornell University was founded in 1865 and which continues till today to be home to students from all over the world.

 
For a student at Cornell, the University campus is all they know when they leave school. There is no time for anything else. Some remember the quadrangle where their department is housed. Others only remember the library where they spent all the hours of all their days here. For a student, this is definitely the centre of the universe with nothing else beyond. But, if you do not come here as a student, it is nice to also experience the town. For instance, there is the Cayuga lake, there are the Taughannock Falls, there is Stewart park and there is the Ithaca Farmer’s Market!

The market is a co-operative with over 150 vendors who live within 30 miles of Ithaca. These vendors bring fruits, vegetables, meat, poultry as well as freshly baked goods, honey and sauces to the market at the Steamboat landing locatio (which we visited) every Saturday and Sunday. There is also the Dewitt Park location where the market takes place on Tuesdays and Thursdays. There are artists and photographers who exhibit their work here. The Ithaca farmers’ market first opened in 1973 as a place for local food growers to sell their produce and for local artisans to market their crafts. Today, the location at the Steamboat landing is also a picnic place as people come here to shop, to listen to music and to just sit by the waterfront.

I am sharing here some photos from our weekend visit, when the weather was absolutely wonderful and we got a glimpse of the ‘shop+picnic’ scene in Ithaca.

There is a lot more about the Ithaca Farmers’ market at: http://www.ithacamarket.com/
 

Faneuil Hall marketplace

I am sitting by the Boston Harbour as I write this post. There’s the hum of people talking as they walk past and the live music that’s playing nearby. There’s a view of the boats at the harbour with the reflection of the afternoon sun shimmering on their sides. This is just a two-minute walk from the Faneuil Hall marketplace where I’ve been all morning, my second time this week. It’s the weekend and there are crowds everywhere.

The Faneuil Hall building as you approach it from the Boston Harbour side

The Faneuil hall has served as a marketplace and meeting hall since it was built in 1742. It was donated to Boston by wealthy merchant Peter Faneuil to accommodate farmers bringing their products to town. The hall was built on land gained by the filling of a cove near the dilapidated town dock. The lower level of the hall was divided into stalls which sold meat, vegetables and dairy products. The large meeting room on the upper floor became Boston’s official town hall.

The Plan of Boston showing the long, rectangular Quincy market and the North & South market buildings on either side as they face the Faneuil Hall. To the right, the map shows the Boston harbour. The 'North End' seen above is an old, Italian neighbourhood.

In 1761, fire gutted Faneuil Hall, burning the interior. Two years later, repairs were completed, this time financed by a public lottery. In 1826, the Marketplace was expanded to include the new Quincy market building (as well as the North market & South market buildings) and became the hub of New England commerce in response to Boston’s rapid growth. These three market buildings along with the Faneuil Hall’s market stalls continued to be Boston’s wholesale food distribution center until the 1960’s. (Source: National Park Service, U.S.Department of the Interior, MA)

The small sign of old times still exists, unlike the signage culture of today where urban landscapes with the scale and intensity of hoardings are becoming "cities of signs"

Today, the Faneuil Hall is not a market in the traditional sense. There are no vendors selling fruits and vegetables or fish and meat. There are no flower sellers or booksellers. There is no barter, there is no bargaining, not anymore. The ground floor contains shops and eating establishments. The second floor meeting room is used by the Park Rangers of the National Park Service. The third floor has the museum and armory of the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company of Massachusetts. Here is a link to the official website: http://www.faneuilhallmarketplace.com/

A shopfront inside the Quincy market building with its line of eateries offering clam chowder, bagel pizzas, icecreams and starbucks coffee and so much else.
 
Now, the Faneuil hall is visited by not only the locals who live in Boston but also tourists who come here from all over the country and from all over the world. You can buy food, you can buy clothes, you can learn about the history of the place, you can hear live music sometimes.

The urban space between the three market buildings becomes the place for social interaction
 
You find places to be with the food and the music; spaces where you can sit and watch people as you contemplate about life. The Faneuil Hall marketplace and the Boston Harbour are urban spaces that are designed to let you do that. And, I think that’s what I like about this marketplace. Here, you can relax after you shop, you can spend time with your family outdoors in the midst of the shopping and the eating. It’s a place where you can take a stroll, have a drink, laugh together as you “do nothing”.

I am reminded of Jan Gehl’s book Life between buildings which emphasizes that planning processes must begin by understanding the spaces between buildings. He says, “First life, then spaces, then buildings – the other way around never works.” The book was first published in 1971 and continues to be a widely used handbook on the relationship between public spaces and the social life in cities.

In an Indian bazaar, the “life between buildings” is sometimes about livelihoods, sometimes about shelter (with streets often encroached upon by migrants & the informal sector). It is never about “doing nothing”. It is not a concept associated with our urban spaces. We do not have planned urban spaces. We have streets that flow into each other and life flows in these streets.

The pushcarts inside the market buildings create an informal environment for shopping. Faneuil Hall marketplace was the first in the country to introduce pushcart shopping providing entrepreneurial opportunity to New England artisans.
 
As I walk the streets of Boston and absorb the marketplace experience at Faneuil Hall, I realize that there is so much to appreciate here and to learn from and simultaneously know that the complexity in the streets of India has its own place. It is yet an unplanned complexity, one in which there are many who participate, knowingly or unknowingly. Of course, the mind goes back to India and to Russell market in Bangalore which a friend tells me has been buzzing with Ramzan festivity in the evenings.

A sign that we'd like to see outside the many, many historic market buildings in the cities of India conserving architectural heritage and our urban heritage.
 
I sit down a second time now to continue writing this post, now at the Coop Store at Harvard Square, away from the sunny marketplace environment of the Faneuil Hall and the Quincy market. The Coop, founded by Harvard students in 1882 and established as a cooperative is open to the public offering four floors of books and a cafetaria. The Coop is a store where you browse books with greater leisure than you would in a library, sipping your coffee and knowing that the Coop Store like the Faneuil Hall is designed for you to contemplate about life and all you want to learn from it.


Related Posts:
The Marketplace: Lonely Planet Blog Carnival #23

Stolen Coffee Room

The ‘Stolen Coffee room’ is a coffee shop which has most of its furniture and the art that fills its walls from Chor Bazaar. Now, that is something new, but that this coffee shop with the ambience and charm of a European café is in Nerul, that is “most unusual”. If you’ve lived in Bombay 15 years before or if you grew up in Bombay before then, you would know what I mean!!

It was a complete revelation to visit Nerul this time I went to Bombay, having lived away for many years now. It’s a relatively new suburb of Bombay. I grew up in Sion and for many living in South Bombay then, Sion was a suburb they had never been to and Nerul is further North! Today, Nerul has modern residential complexes and interesting restaurants that you would want to travel through the city’s traffic to get to (from South Bombay!) Thanks to Anjali who invited me to lunch at the Bangali Mashi's kitchen off Palm Beach road and then to coffee afterwards introducing me to two great places in one afternoon and simultaneously to the changing landscape of the city! You can already read Anjali's totally absorbing post Friendly Neighbourhood Bangali Mashi's Kitchen at her blog dedicated to food Anna Parabhahma. I also liked what Anjali has to say about the Stolen coffee room, to read more on that, you can go here: Lost my heart to the Stolen Coffee room

I’m happy to write this post and include it here on this blog because the ‘Stolen Coffee Room’ has a connection to the Bazaar. As it’s name suggests, it has been designed and put together from selecting objects from Chor Bazaar, which supposedly had stolen items for sale in the old days, though today it is the place to buy antiques in Bombay. I’ve written earlier about Chor Bazaar at Bollywood Posters and Bazaar Tour 2: Antiques Mumbai

Coming back to our coffee shop with its chor bazaar ancestry, it’s design concept is interesting. Not every table at the Stolen Coffee Room looks like another. Each table is a different one. The chairs are all different. As you sit in the café with your cup of coffee, you wonder where that chair has been before, did it belong to another café or was it a family that used it in their home before it was found at Chor Bazaar. There is history behind each painting on the wall, inside every kettle in the glass cupboard.

The other day, a friend who has grown up in Bombay but now lives in Bangalore talked of her excitement at seeing the new “high-end” coffee shop come up opposite her parents’ house in Hill road. “You know, the kind where you get a pastry for Rs.150!” she had said. She was so surprised to find how this once simple Hill road lane had changed with these “high-end” coffee shops coming up in locations where there had once been businesses with “immoral” activities; where brand showrooms had been willing to pay exhorbitant real estate prices for a space in a building which she so clearly remembers from her childhood to be a “panvati” building (That’s Bombay terminology for a building with a curse on it). These changes in old neighbourhoods were becoming more frequent and quite drastic.

Here, in Bangalore, we have been closely watching the changes that have been taking place in the ‘Adigas lane’ – that’s the lane off Bannerghatta road, close to the Arakere gate signal junction. Most of us here call it by this name because of the fast food restaurant ‘Adigas’. It occupies a place close to the corner property. Beyond that and away from the main road were independent houses. It was a quiet lane when we first moved here five years ago. Then, gradually, a Baskin Robbins came up, the vada-pav chain – Goli Pav, the Juhu Bombay Naturals Ice cream parlour, the Lakme Salon moved here. Further down, a gym has opened up and the library chain Just Books and now the Cuppa coffee shop which will be ‘opening soon’. All of this in the last five years.

There is so much that is happening in our lives. There are the old neighbourhoods that are changing rapidly and the new neighbourhoods that are leaping forward. We are becoming a consumerist society and our streets and neighbourhoods seem to mirror it all. You can look into this mirror and think 'our cities are changing' or you can look into it and think 'we are changing, did we want to?'

Related post:
Design Inspiration from the Bazaar

(Anjali, thanks for letting me take pictures with your camera and for your photograph of the blue facade!)