|
Taos Caffeine II
More History, More Innovation A Local Owner March 14, 2007
By Steve Fox
 As reported by the pesky slurper last month, the coffee places in Taos occupy many niches. This month, we drop in at four more hangouts that span the special qualities Taos offers, from the historic building to the latest in snap and verve. They are, in the order they were founded, Taos Cow, Mondo Kultur, Taos Java, and Cup and Saucer.
What a setting Taos Cow has in Arroyo Seco: tables among the willows and cottonwoods on the little Rio Don Fernando; Abe’s Bar and Grocery two doors down; the groovy Mercantile store, Doug West’s gallery, and the Rivers and Birds office across the street. As Bill Whaley showed in “Song for Arroyo Seco” (April ’06 Horse Fly), this pueblito preserves layers of history and gentrification, and everybody loves it.
Jamie Leeson came to town from Boston U. on his way to a post-grad Law and Philosophy program at U.C.-San Francisco-Hastings in 1991, but that Taos thing happened, and he hung out here to ski and work at Dolomite Pizza up at the Ski Valley. Dolomite bought an ice cream-making machine and Boston Jamie had a crankin’ ice cream jones. In a couple of months he bought the machine (still uses it today) and founded Taos Cow in the old Gay Nineties dancehall, across the street from his present location in Seco. For 13 years, he’s used all fine-and-natural-ingredients in his ice cream, like egg yolks, cane sugar, Ghirardelli chocolate, and cream and milk certified free of rGBH (bovine growth hormone). “Look up the exposé by a Baskin-Robbins family black sheep,” Jamie says. “Nearly all commercial ice cream has stuff in it you wouldn’t believe: the scrapings from the milk tanks, even reconstituted tree bark formed into ‘blueberries.’”
Taos Cow makes around 40 flavors. The best sellers: Holstein Sunset, strawberry with light, dark, and milk-chocolate chunks; and Chocolate Rio Grande, with roasted piñons, pecans, and dark chocolate chunks. Jamie says, “the test of an ice cream brand is its vanilla. Ours has fresh egg yolks and Madagascar vanilla beans.”
Cow’s present spot was a general store with a gas pump outside from 1949 to 1985. Go in now and you’ll get the Seco swirl: well-worn Mexican cantina tables (“Tome Pepsi”), eclectic mix of chairs, notices covering the main post and beam, tattoos covering Ali Rossi’s barista arms. “She brings in people from town. She came here from the Northside Bean,” says Jamie. “And Falicia White, she’s been manager here since she was 15.” Tall Falicia comes over and says, “Twelve years ago I was the first ‘Cow Girl.’ He hired me away from Baskin Robbins. I love this place.” Her father is Tomás White, a denizen of Whaley’s tales of Taos bar life. Lindsay Solomon, co-manager, learned coffee at World Cup.
“We’ve become a neighborhood hub and an anchor of Seco,” Jamie says, “because our employees make everybody feel welcome—skiers, hikers, townie-escapers, refugees from tourism, artists, builders, hippies, vagrants. Even vagrants need coffee.”
Taos Cow features a proprietary coffee blend made up for them by Peter Miceli’s Taos Roasters. A sign says it’s “Dark and Muddy.” They also sell and serve Miceli’s Ethiopian Yergecheffe, Espresso Lergara, and Organic Mexican decaf.
The Cow serves 11 sandwiches, including Turkey and Brie, Portabello, and Gyro, and seven pot pies, including chicken, beef, steak, buffalo, veggie, and shepherd’s topped with mashers. Sides include Sweet Potato Salad and Thai Salad with cabbage, mint, cilantro, peanuts, and Thai curry.
Mondo Kultur, at the north end of the strip-mall housing Taos Pharmacy on Paseo Sur, brought an urbane style and a new kind of coffee place to Taos when it opened on New Year’s Day 2005. No, Marc and Jennifer Campbell didn’t design the building. It was a Wells Fargo Mortgage office, curved glass-block wall, curved-chrome ceiling, and all. All Marc and Jen added was the leopard carpet, which a local radio personality warned him would never go over in Taos. Then they stocked the place with classic ’60s posters; magazines on interior design, Asian religions, punk-rock, and fashion; and DVDs heavy on music, drama, comedy, and cult.
The intensely-eyebrowed Campbell is well-known for making waves on the radio and in Horse Fly, but that was inevitable, given his rock and roll background and the distance between his past work and Taos. He and Jen, pals since sixth grade, had high-profile food-industry and pop-culture jobs in Manhattan, L.A., Boulder, and Vegas (the big one). Marc designed and ran clubs in his native Manhattan for 18 years, becoming a “hired gun” who turned around floundering restaurants. Jennifer was merchandising director for all The Gap stores in Manhattan and for Planet Hollywood in L.A.
In 2001, they moved to Vegas where Marc created the Venus Bar in the Venetian Casino, bringing G-string-and-pastie burlesque back. He also created Taboo Cove, which he calls “the first Tiki bar since Trader Vic’s.” At Taboo Cove’s opening, on Sept. 11, 2001, with all his New York bosses there, planes flew into Manhattan buildings and burst the bubble, as they did for the Taos Poetry Circus. “Within three weeks, 80,000 hospitality workers in Vegas were laid off. We went from 350 customers a night at Taboo to 50,” says Marc. “The whole aesthetic shifted from Asian-European elegance, with neo-swing bands and dancing, to local adult-industry workers and guys in tank tops. Jen and I sat on the edge of the bed and cried. The last omen came when lightning struck the single palm tree in front of our house. Out of a clear blue sky!”
So they decided to start over, here. “We added DVDs to the store because Taos Talking Pictures was folding. We decided on coffee and magazines instead of a nightclub after going to Santa Fe and hanging out at Borders.” The posters lining the walls are for vintage ’60s music and Mexican films like the two that frame the front counter, “Espuela de Oro” and “El Rey del Barrio,” the two best posters in town.
Mondo sells several lines of beans. Thanksgiving Coffee Company is a Fair Trade member that channels some profits from its Rwandan coffee to the highland gorilla preserve and the adjacent villages. Another from Thanksgiving is End the Embargo Cuban Coffee. Peter Miceli blends one the Campbells call “Impeach Bush” coffee. “We’ve sold 500 bags of it, just because people like to make that statement,” Marc says. Another new one is Cosmic Blend, “Roasted in Taos, New Mexico, by Genuine Hippies.” Campbell learned how to market with packaging when he founded Green Mountain Herbs and Spices in Boulder in the ’70s, then merged it with Mo Siegel’s tea company to form Celestial Seasonings. Marc came up with the Red Zinger and Sleepytime names.
Mondo offers 13 panini (Italian sandwiches grilled in a press) with deli-style ingredients: Bresaola (thin-sliced air-dried filet mignon), Prosciutto, Italian salami, Italian sausage, plus locally-smoked brisket. They fly in H&H Bagels, called New York’s Best. Two soups, three salads, two quiches, and various stuffed croissants are also on the menu.
Perhaps because of the rich mix of music, magazines, posters, and two TVs playing musicals and cartoons, and perhaps because they’re close to the high school, a lot of young people hang out at Mondo. There are two computers to rent and free wi-fi for laptoppers. My buddy Randy Grubiss, who has tried writing in all of the coffee places, likes Mondo “because it has a great layout and mix of people that creates a sense of community. I’ve had lots of rewarding conversations with strangers there.” Marc says, “We decided to stay open ’til 10 because folks who’ve rehabbed and are in recovery come in rather than going to a bar.”
Taos Java opened just south of Wal-Mart in May 2005. There may have been others over the years, but right now, the only Taos coffee place owned by a Taoseño Hispano family is Taos Java. On a recent Saturday at 9 a.m., there was a jaw-dropping image: a woman with long gray hair, black pants, and tall black boots was sitting in the cozy fireplace corner talking to a friend. Her head was framed by a deep-red tapestry woven by the Java co-owner, Donna Lopez. The three- by four-foot block of electric color had an abstract sun and mountain, with the red shading upward to a darker hue, and the woman’s sleeveless magenta blouse shaded hotly into the weaving. A dozen one-inch squares went diagonally across the weaving morphing from blue to gray, and the woman had slipped her fingers against her scalp and was lifting her silver hair at exactly the angle of the blue-to-gray squares. “Wow!” I said in unison with Anthony Lopez, the weaver’s husband and co-owner. We were having a latté at a back table with Louie, Donna’s grey Chihuahua, and gaping at the hair-blouse-weaving tableau. “Oh man, to have a camera!” We shook our heads.
This kind of scene takes place at Taos Java more than at most other coffee places, because Donna and Anthony have created an interior of luscious jewel-like color. The walls are hot rose, sandstone, terra cotta, and yellow-orange. The bathroom’s purple walls have glitter in them, and a four-foot stippled lizard clings to one wall. Donna Lopez’s weavings throb on Java’s walls. A three-time winner of Best Fiber Arts at Taos Invites Taos, Donna has created weavings of complementary hues that pop! on the walls and deepen the room’s effect. Each piece has a dominant color gradation from saturated to darker, with one-inch squares of complementary colors dancing geometrically across the design: dark blue to teal, adobe to dark brown. Self-taught, she studied master weavings from Chimayó and Oaxaca.
Taos Java has the only drive-up window in coffee-town, and is the only one usually filled with local Taoseño family groups. Donna’s sister Brenda works there, along with friend Vanessa Tafoya. Donna is a Ranchos native, and Anthony came from Ratón, got a law degree in San Francisco, and they raised two girls—Sonya, 16, at Taos High, and Santana, now at Brandeis University in Boston. And here’s a Taos two-degrees-of-separation: Jamie Leeson of Taos Cow came from Boston to attend U.-California-San Francisco Hastings Law School, the same one Anthony Lopez went to, and now they’re both in the coffee business in Taos! There ya go!
The Java building used to be a tire shop and Greyhound Bus station. Gabriel Gonzales of Vadito did the renovation, and Steve Ninneman designed and built the front door with the S-curve and the back door. Anthony and Steve designed the wood condiment counter, main counter, and the back-corner bar-stool counter. Familia Lopez filled the place with curvy carved rustic teak furniture from Thailand, bought from The General Store on Paseo Sur before it closed. Ron Lopez, Anthony’s brother, made the welded-steel sconces in manta-ray and other undersea shapes.
Donna serves Ohori’s coffee from Santa Fe, pulls excellent shots, and makes great smoothies.
The farthest south cuppa joe in town is in Ranchos de Taos, where David Martinez converted the Sweetgrass Café into Cup and Saucer in March 2006. The Cup is in the old Presbyterian schoolhouse, built in what was called Presbyterian Plaza just north of the Post Office. As you can see from the 16-inch-wide boards atop the gently sagging vigas, the building dates from 1888-93. Boards that wide haven’t been milled in Taos for generations. A former student told David that the last teacher at the school, during the Eisenhower administration, struck him repeatedly on the hand for speaking Spanish, then marched him and the rest of the class around the Pres’ Plaza singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”
Handsome David Martinez, with black hair past his shoulders, grew up in Vail, Colorado, of Ute and Arapaho ancestry, making his place the only Native American-owned coffeehouse in town. David has posed for J.D. Challenger and has an eye for art. Three-foot-tall carved wood Kachina-like figures grab your eye as you enter. They are made by Brian Caudillo, a Lakota man living near Oke Oweenge (San Juan) Pueblo. Martinez has rented the front room of the building just north of his coffee house and will exhibit contemporary art there salon style, covering the thick adobe walls.
In a story worthy of the Miraculous Staircase in Santa Fe, a local guy who wouldn’t give his name walked across the road and fixed a break in the Cup’s walls. As David was renovating, he found a bird’s nest dug into the adobe high up on the south wall. When he took it out, a bunch of adobes crumbled in a hail of dust, and three vigas resting on them sagged. Freaked, David came down, shored up the vigas, and wondered what to do. The guy walked over with a trowel, shovel, and wheelbarrow, and said, “Learn somethin’.” He made adobes on the spot, showed David how the 1888 builders put the vigas on flat rocks with a line of stones lower down for more stability, and fixed the crumbling wall in four days. “Learned somethin’ today,” the samaritan said, as he went back across the street.
The café seats 24 at chocolate-colored oak tables, and Martinez warns patrons that he’s committed to making every order fresh, so it may take a bit, and he may run out of specials. He serves quiche for $3.95 a slice, a smoked salmon plate for $7.95, and an egg and cheese sandwich for $3.95, bacon or ham added for $1.15. David had so many locals drop by looking for this or that staple that he now sells single eggs for 20 cents and a cup of flour for 60 cents. Martinez bakes every day, including whole-wheat bagels, and has free wi-fi. The place exudes slow-paced old New Mexico.
|
