Tag: coffee

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A squareish hand-painted metal sign with the words 'Coffee,' 'Espresso' and 'Wifi' stacked vertically. The letters and border are black on a bright yellow background. The sign hangs from an ornamented wrought-iron-style stand above a planter and is viewed diagonally from above. Between 'Coffee' and 'Espresso' there's a drawing of a cup and saucer with steam rising from it.

When I took this photo back in 2016, it was a combination coffee/Chinese food restaurant: they sold coffee in the mornings and Chinese food for lunch and dinner. The owner had previously run a separate coffee shop (The Bean Counter, IIRC) in the same shopping center, then combined the two businesses to save on rent. It was one of our go-to Chinese takeout sources, and I’d sometimes grab coffee in the mornings if I was in the area or on my way somewhere in that direction.

The old coffee location sat vacant for a few years until a bakery (with coffee on the side) moved in. Amusingly, the bakery — with is still there today — also chose a pun-based name: Redondough (as in Redondo Beach).

In early 2020 — and I mean early, either January or February — they were offered a really nice buyout price by someone who wanted to turn-key convert it overnight to a Hawaiian restaurant. I imagine when mid-March rolled around and the initial Covid lockdown started, they were extremely relieved to have accepted it!

I never did get around to trying the Hawaiian place, even for takeout. Eventually it was taken over by a Hawaiian-style fast food chain.

Photo taken February 27, 2016 and originally posted on my Instagram account a few days later with this title, but no commentary.

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Sign on a pillar proclaiming "Internet WWW Access."

Update: Oddly enough, I did find gopher access down the block:

Gopher on iNaturalist

Close-up of a light-brown gopher's head, sticking up out of a hole in light-brown sandy ground with a few twigs and dried leaves around it.

Update May 2024: Coffee Cartel still has the sign outside, though of course they’d already switched to WiFi long before I took these photos. Come to think of it, I have no idea whether they ever did have a computer for guest internet access, though they’ve been around long enough. Despite all the other changes (and coffee shops) in the area, they’re still the kind of local place you want to hang out at, not just a trendy spot with walls that echo every chair movement.

(To be fair, I haven’t actually been to the Hi-Fi Espresso across the street, only the other location in Hermosa Beach, and the CBTL that used to be around the corner felt a bit more like someplace to stay a while than the Starbucks across the street or, and was bigger than the Peet’s across the other street. And last I was down this way, Offset Coffee around the other corner hadn’t opened yet.)

Plus Coffee Cartel has outdoor seating within range of that WiFi, which is more important now than it was in 2019.