Ode To Lulu’s

Back in the mid-1990s, not long after I had moved to New Haven from New York City, I was sitting at Lulu’s European Coffeehouse enjoying a mug of her high-test, low acid brew when the eponymous hero of the shop sat down and shoved a sheaf of crumpled papers at me. ​“This is my friend’s writing,” she said. ​“You simply must read it.”

Reading other people’s writing is trouble. It means forming an opinion about someone’s proudest creation and is, for anyone, a special intrusion. But that’s what coffee shops are somehow all about, right? Places where bare acquaintances can interact with the kind of awkward intimacy we normally reserve for family reunions. Especially these days when our screen-mediated lives don’t offer too many opportunities for what romantic city planners like to call ​“community.”

For 24 years, Lulu deCarrone has been at 49 Cottage St. trading in that urban dream, along with pouring a great cup. Now word is out: Lulu has decided to sell the place. Longtime baristo David Oricchio plans in a month or so to take over the shop, which will soon assume a new name as well a new mood and tone.

Can I take a moment here, verklempt as I might be? 

Oh, wait — that sheaf of papers. Turns out, that was some of the most extraordinary writing I have ever read. The author was Lulu’s friend, a doctor named John Sundin, who was stationed in Rwanda at a time when the Hutus and Tutsis were furiously butchering one another. 

Sundin was holed up in a convent. Every morning, he greeted dozens of wounded from both sides, separating those who were about to die from those he could possibly save. Lacking decent supplies, it was essentially Camp Andersonville in there. The nuns working with him had a gas powered generator that they turned on once or twice a day to keep the refrigeration going. The convent’s satellite phone could also send a fax. Here’s the thing: The only fax number Sundin could remember belonged to a friend of Lu’s.

So, while newspapers were filled with accounts written by reporters safely 500 miles away, taking down information from fleeing refugees, Lulu was holding hand-written dispatches, a few hours old, straight from the epicenter of a raging holocaust. 

I jumped on the phone and called my editor at Harper’s Magazine, and a few days later, in went Sundin’s astonishing accounts. When he did finally get out, the other national media went crazy. He made the rounds through the studios of Charlie Rose and Ted Koppel. People Magazine named him one of their ​“People of the Year.” 

The Genius Of A Great Coffee Shop

In a tiny place like Lulu’s, accidental encounters like that happen more often than not. In fact, scholars of innovation at business schools have tried to bottle this pleasure. (Google ​“random collisions.”) Silicon Valley architects pour over the schematics of cafeterias and pocket parks, trying to figure out the best way to get strangers to bump into one another and converse.

That, it turns out, is one of the best paths to novel ideas, and it is the genius of a great coffee shop. 

That’s why Lulu enraged many of her customers a few years back when she instituted a computer ban in the place. She preferred awkward conversations to the moody silence of a screen. She instinctively wanted random collisions. But a bunch of regulars wanted their mini-library mode, and, annoyed, eventually moseyed off to farther canteens. 

In a town like New Haven, rich in coffee shop expertise, it’s not hard to find other joints that understand that a good coffee shop is as much a function of architecture as it is getting the right brew. Manjares in Westville (run by Lulu alumna Ana De Los Angeles) sets an array of tables in a staging ground near the counter, creating little moments of encounter. Fuel in Wooster Square does it the same way Lulu does. And Koffee? on Audubon Street splits the difference, setting up a mini-library in the back room while the front is crazy with comfy sofas and coffee tables, where at any moment you might be talking to a nuclear physicist or a drama queen from ECA. 

Compare that with the vast waiting-roominess of a Starbuck’s, where a groggy entropy reigns throughout all that space — a scatter graph of isolation.

Saturday and Sunday morning at Lulu’s is kiddie time. I raised my own children in this accidental day care, and over the years I have seen romances bloom there, marriages get announced there and, somewhat later, babies toddle out of strollers there. If having a 2‑year-old suddenly steady himself with peanut buttery hands on your new corduroys bothers you, then you might want to join the computer freaks in Siberia. 

A coffee shop is a little bit like a democracy. If it’s a good one, you’re never gonna like everybody in there. But the ones you do like will make all the difference in the world. 

Coffee shops are simply useful, too, in the plainest utilitarian way. Despite all the digital boasting, the best form of crowdsourcing, still, is not the internet but word of mouth. I cannot count how many problems I have solved at Lulu’s. Who are the trustworthy electricians in the neighborhood? Who can waterproof a sweating basement? Blow insulation into a frigid attic floor? Fix the pipes? Move a wall? Get a cup of coffee at Lulu’s early in the morning and find the table of men grousing about these very subjects, and the name of the best roofer in town (Pat Tarantino) or contractor (Ron Oster) will bubble right up. 

Dried-Up Piece Of Roast Goat

Is there really any other kind of shop that functions this way? No one goes to a Verizon store or a hamburger stand to find anything beyond a phone or a lunch. But a coffee shop is different. The great impressarios, like Lulu, understand this — that it’s this kinetic communion generated by modern culture’s only legal amphetamine experienced in an architectonically compressed space. 

Nearly 300 years ago, Bach recognized this fact. He was a frequenter of a place called Zimmerman’s in Leipzig (which was still pouring brew until we bombed the Nazis there in World War II). There he composed the kaffeekantate, the Coffee Cantata. Go listen to it right now: 

Three centuries before Lulu opened in East Rock, you can hear in Bach’s frenetic composition that electric pressure of starting the day fresh, the pulsing of a human body gearing up for something just awesome. Bach also captures the other side of coffee. There are lyrics to this piece, and who can disagree with Johann Sebastian when his heroine wails that without her coffee she’s ein verdorrtes Ziegenbrätchen (a dried-up piece of roast goat)?

Every day, some new idea begins in a coffee shop. It’s why these places never disappear or even fundamentally change — despite invasions by fascists … or hipsters. (And despite the preciousness of parvenus buying $10,000 espresso makers. Or people swooning about the pour-over. Or that whole Kopi Luwak crap — no, literally: Google it.)

There is a good argument that in Bach’s BWV 2111 one can hear the earliest stirring of modern pop culture. Writing music in a coffee shop stood in direct opposition to writing sacred music in a cathedral. The kaffeekantate is among those pieces of music composed with no intention to glorify the Lord, only to catch the rhythm of people getting fired up and ready to go. No doubt, parents at the time saw the danger in Johann Sebastian’s composition. Bach’s hyperactive melody leads inexorably to Elvis’s hips, Frankie Lymon’s dance partner, Mick Jagger’s lips, Barbara Eden’s navel, Jimi Hendrix’s leather pants, Rihanna’s underboob, Ellen DeGeneres’s primetime kiss, Janet Jackson’s nipple, Harry Styles’s hair, and on to Allison Williams’ latest acting breakthrough. 

Taking the long view, it would seem that coffee shops are destroying civilization as fast as they create it. 

That’s as good a description of what Lulu brought to the neighborhood — awkward and tedious conversations with boors (maybe I was one of those, for you) or an unexpected encounter that led to something romantic, brilliant or beautiful. Yet so much of what happens there is hard to describe — gorgeous little moments that belong in a novel and nowhere else.

Premarital Trump

There was this one time: The place was packed — contractors, an astronomer, delivery men, a couple of theologians, a cop and me. I think we were arguing about where the best butcher in town could be found. Then this kid walks in all dolled up in young fogey drag. You know the look: bowtie, blazer, loafers, and carefully crafted hair that one might call premarital Trump.

He silenced the place by walking up to the counter and saying, ​“I’m looking for a tropical roast, somewhat nutty, with a woody finish.” 

Lulu, who on blue-moon occasions can muster a near Keaton deadpan, replied, ​“I serve coffee.” With that, young George Will exited, leaving behind a frozen silence which broke when somebody said, ​“Should we chase him down and beat his ass?”

There was one of those incandescent moments, blazing with laughter, before we all settled back down to the business at hand.

Best butcher in town? Not a contest, really: It’s Jimmy Apuzzo, right next door.