The FenReview
The Rustic Coffee Bar
(14 Jul 2008)
There is a new coffee house in Fairhaven.
Back when I started my comic, it seemed like Bellingham got a new coffee shop or stand every three months. And during that time, I kind of made it my duty to visit each new one as it opened up. I had the time and the disposable income, and it was fun to compare them.
Then the city went through a period of time where the coffee growth serious slowed down. And I settled down into my favorite cafe, the Black Drop, and started seriously cartooning and shit while there. Actually, I'd swing by Le Vie En Rose for their cookies and muffins, because they taste better than anything anybody else has (except for Great Harvest Bakery, which has awesome cinnamon rolls and incredible brownies). But most coffee shops carry the cookies and muffins from this place called Grace Cafe, which puts so much sugar into their stuff that that is all you can taste. Sugar. It's gross. But I digress, almost.
I believe it was Thursday morning of last week that I decided to walk down to Fairhaven from my parents' house to find a mocha. I was headed for Tony's, I think, or some other place I've been, when I walked down McKenzie street where these new buildings have gone up and noticed this commercialized alleyway that hadn't been there before. McKenzie Alley it's called, and it has shop space for rent in it. And at the end of my jaunt through McKenzie Alley, I found the Rustic Coffee Bar. You can find my photo review of the Rustic here.
I suggest, in my old tradition, that you go and check them out if you're ever in the neighborhood. They're new, and they're likely to be open when you walk by.
Now, I'm going to give them a critique. Like what you'd expect for a work of art. This critique is in the hopes that everyone who reads it will benefit, and that in the act of writing it I might become just a little smarter too.
The Presentation
When you encounter this place, what you'll find is the first business to open up in the shop space for rent. It's very clean, and the building itself is rather fancy. And being in the newly developed part of Fairhaven, I imagine the rent is rather high. Consequentially, the Rustic's owners have aimed high. It fits its space.
The decor is simple, well build, comfortable and warmly colored. There is black painted iron and burnished copper, and black leather chairs next to a bookshelf full of books. They also have a little gas hearth on the bar farthest from the counter.
When I walked in there late morning (a typically slow period for most coffee shops), there were customers. These customers helped prove the acoustics of the place, which have a little bit of an echo but are duller and more subdued than most other coffee shops. You can probably hear yourself talk there, even during busy hours. Which is nice. And it's pretty quiet when it's near empty.
In short, it's shiny (in the Firefly sense) and inviting. You could do business in there, or homework, or just relax. And the outdoor seating is out of the way of traffic. I see mostly good choices all around, so long as they didn't spend too much of their money starting it up.
The Business
One of the big problems that new businesses in Bellingham have is that unless you magically make a big splash in the community right off the start, it'll take about four years before people stop thinking of your place as an upstart. A very common mistake is for entrepreneurs to ignore this wisdom and fail to give themselves the financial cushion to weather that period, because chances are they are going to be losing money for most of it.
Fortunately, while I have no idea what they've chosen to do financially, the Rustic has taken some serious action to compete in the market. They are open from 6 am to 8 pm, which is both earlier and later than any coffee house in the neighborhood. That's just long enough to get a studying crowd, and just early enough to get the people who're walking to work. And their location ain't bad. While it's not on a major thoroughfare, it is close enough for people to shift their paths on the way down to central Fairhaven, and it's just out of the way enough for those who're trying to find someplace kinda private. And it's on the opposite side of Fairhaven from Avenue Bakery, which would probably be their biggest competition in the morning.
Unfortunately, they have Grace Cafe cookies. I highly recommend that they lose those and start going with anything from Great Harvest. On the other hand, the almond poppyseed muffin I had from there was not Grace Cafe, and it was very good, so those who don't like to be killed with an overabundance of sugar in their pastries do have a choice.
Finally, they've chosen to use what appears to be powdered Girardelli chocolate for their mochas. If you're going to go with a mainstream chocolate, you cannot lose with that. Especially if you've learned the trick of mixing it in with your drinks properly, which their baristas have! Most people love Girardelli, so that's a winner. Me? I've been spoiled by Mallard Ice Cream's chocolate fudge sauce, but they don't sell that outside of their own shop yet. The really important thing is that the Rustic is not using Hershey's syrup (gag!).
Oh, and their prices are fair. About 20 to 30 cents less than I expected to pay, but not so low that I'd worry for the place.
Anyway, even with all this, only time will tell if they've got the right mix. I'm actually kind of optimistic, though.
the Coffee
I'm an uneducated coffee snob. I know what I like and I know what I don't like, but there's a whole lotta stuff in between that I'm unfamiliar with. And my propensity to order double tall mochas is not very good for sussing out good espresso. I really should go back to the Rustic and order a doppio (two shots of espresso with nothing else in it), and then again and order an americano.
The mocha I had, though, was mostly good. The foam was great, the heft of the 12 oz drink felt right, and most of the flavor was smooth and what I expected. And they made it in a reasonably short time. However, there was a bit of a sour note to the drink. It wasn't enough to turn me off from it, and it might have been a fluke of that one preparation. Again, I need to go back a couple times to truly judge. The important thing is that it is good enough to visit regularly, and to give them good hints (requests, not orders) as to how to improve (if you know what you're talking about).
They seem willing and eager to do a good job, and I've seen better coffee shops start off much worse.
If I spend more time in Fairhaven, it would probably end up being my neighborhood haunt.
But I'll always be a Droptard. That's going to be a hard habit for anyone to wrest from me. In the end, that's probably what's going to make or break the Rustic - whether or not they can build up a community of regulars in short order. And judging by who I met while there, that might just happen.
Posted by Fenmere
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