depends on your definition of "coffee"

This is the Aster Cafe:

It's in an old converted warehouse in the St. Anthony Main district of Minneapolis, on the East Bank. I bet that some of you didn't know that Minneapolis has an East and West Bank. Que magnifique!

Aster is a comfortable, unpretentious cafe with rough wooden beams for a ceiling- not the clean, shellacked kind chosen by an architect to give a newly built location that classic look (what? who said Caribou?), but actual old wood, the kind that collects a fuzzy combination of cobwebs and dust that seems to have a symbiotic relationship with rough wooden beams. Although what the beams get out of it, I don't know.

This is an exchange I overheard during a Saturday lunch rush:

Impatient Customer: Do you have wireless internet?

Teenage Barista: No, we don't.

Customer: (Now slightly confused and annoyed) So you're not a coffee shop anymore?

Restrainedly Polite Teenage Barista: (refrains from glancing at the large chalk board behind her bearing the coffee menu and prices) We are a coffee shop. We just don't have wireless.


Might I also point out that the white signboard out front says "Coffee" in big letters. That whole wired-coffee/wired-technology double meaning has long been exploited by the coffee shop marketing people, but this is taking it a little far. I'm imagining a future world in which caffeine and wireless signals interact in the human body in some inextricable way.