Nine a.m. class every day may seriously kill me this quarter. Call me a spoiled humanities student, but awakening before the sun is out in Westwood and when the only students roaming campus are as bleary-eyed as I am feels awfully exhausting. I’m sure I’ll soon grow accustomed to this routine, but for right now, I’ve got to find a way to survive.
Sure, I could simply go to bed earlier or complete my homework further in advance, but one simple solution beckons to me: coffee. Seeking out great coffee, however, does not simply have to mean a trip to a soulless Starbucks or Coffee Bean. This is not to say that I don’t enjoy Starbucks coffee ““ I do ““ but half the fun of drinking coffee (aside from the caffeine fix) is drinking it in a coffee shop where some of the best people-watching and relaxation can be found.
Unfortunately, most of the people you watch outside of the Westwood Starbucks or Coffee Bean are homeless, and uncomfortably trying to ignore them sift through trash cans and howl about the world’s sinners is anything but relaxing.
Hunting for independent coffee shops tends to connote pretension, however, implying some sort of bohemian desire to beat the man! Deny an investment with “big-money” corporations! Support African children! Dying African children!
For me, however, finding a place to drink coffee, study or simply relax is not necessarily about the politics, but rather my own desire for aesthetic comfort and for an experience that doesn’t feel the same as one I could have had in my hometown Starbucks. Constant deja vu when buying a cup of coffee frankly depresses me. I can be much more focused on my homework, much more relaxed and content with my surroundings, and much more satisfied when I feel as though I’ve found a place that feels comfortable and homey and that encourages me to stay longer than the 15 minutes it takes for my coffee to be ground.
With some reading and research under my belt, I found an inconspicuous cafe hiding at the corner of a strip mall on Rochester Avenue between Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards. From the outside, Café Balcony looks as though it could just as easily be a liquor store or a donut shop, with a giant plastic sign above the doorway reading merely “CAFÉ” in large, industrial-style block letters.
Upon entering, however, the cafe’s appearance transforms from that of a sketchy bail bond shop to a cozy paradise: red walls, mismatched tables and chairs, dilapidated squishy couches, paintings on the wall of Buddhist statues and zen gardens, a simple chalkboard menu (no gingerbread vanilla peppermint lattes) and old-timey glass cookie jars beckoning customers with palmier cookies.
I soon discovered, too, that Café Balcony’s coffee differs from the competitors’ because it’s brewed from a siphon. A siphon looks like a piece of chemistry lab equipment; water is heated over an open flame with the coffee beans, then the liquid is vacuumed through a tube and dripped into a cup to make delicious coffee. I’m not really sure what the siphoning effect does exactly, but it sure is neat to hear your drink bubbling in a large, glass, beaker-like container.
The place was inhabited by a fair number of coffee snobs who probably knew the difference, as I overheard a man clutching an L.A. Times under his arm asking about the “house roast” and its qualities in the siphoned coffee.
In spite of some of the inherent pretension of serving coffee from a special filtration device and some of its seemingly sophisticated patrons, Café Balcony felt free of artifice. I arrived at the shop as soon as it opened along with another woman and two men. All of us simply sat there, slowly sipped away at our drinks, and read our own respective books for a couple of hours.
Not everyone sitting there was young, hip and blue-haired either. A 30-something-year-old man slurped a cappuccino with his spoon while slouched on the ragged red couch breaking the binding of a Stephen King novel. A middle-aged woman drank a short glass of espresso while hunched over a laptop. A couple in their 20s sat outside on one of the cafe’s patio-side tables and shared a latte and a cigarette.
The whole scene felt distinctly charming and refreshing. After a busy first week of awakening early, I was rejuvenated with my iced Americano, my school books, and the smell of ground coffee beans warming me all the way through my body.
Sure, I may barely survive this quarter’s early hours, but if I keep seeking out places like Café Balcony, it may not be quite so bad.
If you know why coffee from a siphon tastes better, e-mail Cohn at jcohn@media.ucla.edu.