The best coffeehouse in the United States isn’t located in Seattle or Portland or NYC or any of the usual suspects. Nope. Rather, Press Coffee Bar is nestled between a parking lot and a sewing shop, across the street from a pair of abandoned warehouses and beneath several stories of old brick apartments in Dayton Ohio, the birthplace of aviation, the cash register, and hundred-spoke gold rims.
I’m sitting at Press now, tucked in the back enjoying a black coffee, a subtle milieu of roasted beans and Radiohead’s OK Computer in the atmosphere around me. Back in Dayton for a spell, I’ve been spending a lot of time here dotting the I’s and crossing the T’s in Ryan’s and my next book, Everything That Remains.
The shop’s tattooed proprietors, Brett and Janell Barker, are hard at work behind the counter, utterly unaware I’m writing this. The Barkers are an awesome husband-and-wife duo, wonderful in more ways than one: friendly, attentive, passionate, etc., etc. Plus, they are sticklers for detail. From the wood floors and wood-paneled walls, to the music and changed-monthly local-art installations, everything at Press is carefully and intentionally curated. Not to mention a handful of employees—Caleb, Awni, Brenden, Eric—who feel much more like family than staff, and customers who seem to embody a Cheers-esque camaraderie (Woody Harrelson and I went to the same high school after all, albeit two decades apart).
Oh, and then there’s the coffee of course: sourced from only the best roasters and brewed or pulled so carefully—so meticulously—that it resembles art much more than foodservice. All of which culminates in the perfect coffeehouse—elegant and unpretentious and simple.
The simplicity of Press transcends the shop itself. Not simple for the sake of being simple, Press is simple because they’ve eliminated the excess in favor of the essential. It was Brett, after all, who convinced me to do the same with my coffee…
Back in the day, I used to load my cup of joe with heaps of cream and sweetener, more like a weak, milky, calorie-laden dessert than a drink. As I stirred in the excess, Brett would to quietly rib me, encouraging me to enjoy the flavor without the additives.
I didn’t listen. Well at least not at first; not until the day when they ran out of my sweetener of choice, and I was forced to go without. It was an unpleasant shock at first—drinking only coffee and cream—but soon my taste buds adjusted, and guess what: I could better taste the coffee, and so I went without sweetener from then on.
A month later, being the experimenter I am, I wondered what my coffee would taste like without milk, so I ordered an Americano and shook my head when Janell asked whether I wanted room for cream. Because I was unacclimated, the first sip was bitter, a strong punch to the palate. But then of course, a few days in, I acquired the taste, and for the first time in my life I could taste the actual coffee. It was more delicious than any of the sugary, weak, milky cups of yesteryear. Suffice it to say I never went back.
It seems to me that black coffee is also a synecdoche for life: when you eliminate the excess… [Read more of this article on The Minimalists]
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