I visited a new Washington emporium this week, a Temple of Cool so neat and unconventional it took a few mins to figure out what — accurately — they do in a shiny, white minimalist space.
Did we incidentally finish adult during a Genius Bar? Am we during a law firm? Oh, wait. That’s right.
Coffee.
Really, expensive, delicious, ah-mazing coffee: $4 for a highball potion of iced joe left in 4 sips.
It’s one of those craft-caffeine palaces that are proliferating via Washington. This one is called Blue Bottle Coffee, now in Georgetown though shortly opening outposts in other tools of a District.
This is what a nation’s collateral is becoming, isn’t it?
Because, to be honest, we can’t means to splash coffee during a place like this each day. And conjunction can many city residents who have been here most longer than we have.
Just final week, we listened a news that pronounced Washington is one of a nation’s misfortune places to try to tarry on a six-figure salary. Yup. Make $100,000 and we won’t be vital vast in a land of million-dollar condos and $14 cocktails.
Places like Blue Bottle — that blossomed in another super-rich city, San Francisco — are a canaries signaling an increasingly gilded age.
[‘It done America probable for me’: The final hours in a mislaid retreat for a homeless]
And gentrification circa 2017 in Washington has a distinct punch to it.
Because it’s not only that imagination people have changed in with their imagination things.
Caviar and champagne aren’t displacing a trout and drink of working-class, old-school Washington. No, a approach it happens currently is: The existent enlightenment is co-opted and remade — prettified, up-classed and one-percented — in a arrange of feel-good gentrification that creates it untouched to a really people who have lived here their whole lives.
It’s a $9 half-smoke with hummus.
A $25 burger with foie gras.
A $4 shot of coffee.
See, we’re not removing absolved of your food, we’re only reinventing it.
Washington has turn a place where doughnuts, beer, burgers, chicken, coffee — staples of unchanging people — have been seized, crafted and fancified.
That’s what’s different, engaging and maybe discouraging about this call of gentrification. Don’t demeanour for a Gucci store to see if your neighborhood’s hot. Look for a $25 image of artisanal grits.
I am totally guilty of coveting twee food.
Ten years ago, we waited 45 mins during a Blue Bottle coffee transport during a farmers marketplace in San Francisco. My crony who lived there told me about this ah-mazing coffee that we had to try, so we went.
And we butterfingered a latte right after shopping it. Splash. The throng groaned. For a moment, we deliberate beating a pavement. But a few drops remaining in a crater were adequate to tell me it was ah-mazing.
So there we was this week, 10 years and dual kids after during a Blue Bottle Coffee that isn’t only a cart, it’s a dog-whistle for a city’s uber-affluent. You can even get a little symbol with zero though a iconic blue bottle on it. Like a congressional lapel pin. You’re in a club.
Blue Bottle originated in a guy’s garage in Oakland. People waited in line down a travel to get some. After offered coffee from carts in San Francisco, a association got a initial bricks-and-mortar place in a city. A great, American story of entrepreneurship. Totally.
But Blue Bottle’s arena also reflected San Francisco’s mutation from an costly place to live to a totally unaffordable place to live.
And afterwards a coffee association began opening in cities only as disdainful — Los Angeles, New York, Tokyo.
Now D.C. has warranted that Platinum City status. We get one, too. Wait, make that three, with dual opening shortly in a super-trendy Union Market (once famous as a decidedly untrendy Florida Market) and a Wharf (the rebranded Maine Avenue Fish Market).
It’s a same regulation that brought us Shake Shack and Momofuku, imports from cities that have super-glammed themselves into a stratosphere that few can afford.
[From Chocolate City to Latte City: Being black in a new D.C. ]
The changes in a District aren’t simply about a pale of Chocolate City. The city’s secular makeup has undergone a thespian change, with African Americans no longer a infancy of a race for a initial time in decades.
Today’s change is also about economics. The operative category and a center category — a Dunkin’ Donuts coffee drinkers, a $5 sandwich eaters — are being pushed out by a people who can means a Temple of Cool.
I’ll be a initial one to admit, we was flattering silly when we listened this imagination coffee place was entrance to a city. But when we got there and looked around, it done me worried — and sentimental for a approach Washington used to be.
Twitter: @petulad
Read some-more Petula Dvorak:
This woman’s name appears on a Declaration of Independence. So because don’t we know her story?
Frigid offices, frozen women, preoccupied men: An air-conditioning investigation
The newest vaunt on a Mall? Fear of immature African Americans
Parents of ill kids try to remind Congress what’s during interest in a health-care debate
In Ocean City, Hooters, thongs and fear over topless women on a beach
He was inept in a shooting, though she wanted to marry him. Now that destiny is gone.