Trip Report: Calafia Cafe & Market A-Go-Go (Palo Alto, CA)
Posted by TheShot on 08 May 2009 | Tagged as: Foreign Brew, Local Brew
This split café and to-go market is founded by Chef Charlie Ayers, famous for catering for the Grateful Dead (as evidenced by the large wall photo inside) and the initial food operations at Google. This place is his attempt to make his Google cafeteria “public.”
It has limited outdoor table and picnic bench seating. Inside is split between the café and market storefronts. The former has metal chairs and tables with set wine glasses, and the later offers a salad bar, coffee bar, and no seating whatsoever.
Using a two-group La Marzocco Linea (next to a Clover), they pull shots of Barefoot‘s The Boss blend — resulting in a swirled medium brown crema on a double shot (by default). The shot is very mellow and smooth, with a crema that’s well-integrated with the body of the espresso. Flavorwise, it has a mild pungency but surprisingly lacks any distinctive or strong flavors. Still, it’s a good mellow cup — and is surprisingly served in a real Dudson cup despite the lack of seating. (Though you can park yourself by the cocktail seating in the café next door.)
Read the review of Calafia Cafe & Market A-Go-Go in Palo Alto, CA.
5 Comments »
what you fail to mention is the space is 1/2 and organic foods cafe with wifi tableside service, the other side is self check out organic foods to go as well as made to order, the best coffee machinery in the business, why would you have seating offered in a grab and go market other than the coffee / wine bar, after all is grab and go, not grab and sit down, if you wanna do that you can go to the kick ass cafe side first.
jez some people just dont get a good thing when it whacks upside the head.
Most cafés in the Bay Area — and by “most” we mean more than 95% — offer for-here coffee by requiring the customer to order at the register first. The only register for that purpose is consequentially located right in front of the coffee machinery: in the to-go half of the place, where there is no seating.
To their credit, they readily serve espresso orders in real (i.e., not paper) cups in the to-go half. But you’re left wondering where to consume it. You have to go to the other half of the operation, which is set up much more as a restaurant than as a “coffee / wine bar”. (At least if you want coffee when lunchtime is approaching.)
In our judgment, if anyone needs whacking upside the head, it’s a person who operates a coffee operation where patrons simply ordering a for-here coffee must sit at a white tablecloth setting lined up with wine glasses, chargers/plates, and lunch menus — and is expected to give their order to wait staff. By offering no middle ground between zero-service runner’s coffee in a paper cup and the full-service restaurant experience for a mere single espresso, Calafia is actively discouraging the most frequent kind of for-here coffee consumption.
What Calafia desperately needs, and is commonplace to their competitors, is clearly dedicated indoor bar space to bridge both service extremes and encourage more customers in that middle ground. Just look at the short bar space on the right in the fourth photo above: nothing about that says, “Sit here for a coffee.” We honestly felt we were entering a restaurant with how the Calafia side was set up, which is overkill when you just want a coffee. If we didn’t come in with the intent of a review, we would have left and looked for coffee elsewhere.
This may sound a trivial issue worthy of only flippant answers, but we’ve witnessed too many cafés and restaurants fail over the years for the primary reason that they did not properly allocate the right square footage ratios between restaurant and bar.
It is clear that the owners didn’t fully understand what concept they wanted to convey and didn’t do the correct demographic research. Then they made some bad decisions concerning guest perception. We are not all privileged or even conditioned to eating with cutting edge technology in a dining establishment. Things like eating the to go food in the dining area are the guest’s decisions to make. When it comes down to basics it is about what the guest wants and the guest will win every time. I pass by this place everyday and you can tell business is way down and it is yet another bad idea destined for failure. There is little attention given to what the customers wants and needs are here. It’s more designed to have people eat the way they want them too.
@clammy: I’m not certain on how well their business is doing. That said, I think you’re absolutely on to something in pointing out that the place exhibits a gap between consumer behaviors the owners desired and the way consumers naturally behave.
For example, we know people who really like the Bay Area, quasi-fast-food restaurant chain Pluto’s. However, we cannot stand the place — and part of why comes down to what we feel is a byzantine ordering system. The owners have long been proud of their “innovative” food-station-based dining process, whereas we feel they’ve reinvented the wheel for little customer value other than to confuse new patrons. We’re more than happy to accommodate different cultural practices when we’re ordering food in a foreign country, but not if we’re ordering a salad in the Inner Sunset.
While we don’t believe that the customer is always right, Calafia would likely do well to make changes. To their credit, they don’t seem nearly as inflexible as Pluto’s.
Just discovered your blog. Lots of interesting stuff here!
I haven’t been to Calafia Cafe yet so I appreciate the detailed review. Good to know they serve Barefoot. One of the few good coffee houses we have here in the south bay LOL.