More than 20 years ago, at the beginning of my coffee career, I worked at Simon’s Coffee Shop at 1736 Mass ave in Cambridge.
I got my start there in coffee by taking that part-time job. I began blogging there. I found friends and customers there. It was what proved to me that I could eventually build my own space with barismo.
Just not in the way you might think.
You may think this is a sad post about a closing or a nod to a store owner, but stay with me to the end.
When I began working for Simon, he told me he'd had a not-so-successful café on the North Shore before this and worked at Kmart before that. He was hesitant, and really quite risk-averse. To me, he was timid but pleasant.
I was not, at that time, timid or pleasant.
I was headstrong and latched onto something I saw in the potential of such a space. This led me to constantly push him to change, to update, to be more than the shop he'd bought.
Simon hadn't built that space from scratch.
When he took it over, the café had previously been owned by the indie video rental store downstairs and was essentially modeled after 1369 in Central. The owner, George, must have liked the model being next door in Central and wanted his own version in Porter.
The Hollywood Espresso Cafe came complete with colorful orange tones and movie-themed posters clear-coated onto different cabinets. Some were probably still there on the walls if you looked up high carefully. The café served really dark-roast Rao coffee with no roast dates and had this massive chalkboard menu common to cafés of its time, but with a handful of odd themed drinks like the Casa Blanca, a white chocolate au lait I absolutely detested.
When I arrived in Boston in the early 2000s, I worked there part time while also working part time at a bubble tea shop on JFK Street.
Simon had three managers in that one small shop. That led to constant crossed wires and over-ordering. There was clutter everywhere. Extra paper cups were stored under a trap door to the basement, which required moving customers and tables while making sure nobody came out of the bathroom and fell straight down the open stairs.
That made rushes almost comical at times.
We each had chalk anime-style caricatures on the cabinets behind the counter. Angry Andy had his CD placed on the counter because he hated being asked what music was playing. There were relics of the video-store ownership, but they gave the place an oddly charming feel.
So many customers had special drinks that the register had what felt like an entire screen of drinks named after individual people.
And those customers, more than anything, were what made Simon's a unique place.
I remember them well. Bringing a haiku to the counter every day, a particular drink order, a shared interest. At the time, I thought it was special, but now I realize that's what a third space truly is.
I came into that shop, in my own way, as an antagonist to Simon's. In 2006, I wrote about those early days in "Going full circle".
I was stubborn and difficult, naive and idealistic. I cleaned and organized. I chuffed at the expansive menu, suggested changes and lobbied for new gear. I irritated two of the three managers enough that they eventually left.
Colleen, though, stayed on as a manager for a while, and she allowed me to keep plugging along with near-constant incremental changes. I argued for better coffee, better gear, better training and events. I even learned latte art from a picture in a magazine and brought it into the café to teach others.
I represented the shop in competitions and pushed for a place at the table during the third-wave trend as we rotated through a who's who of coffee brands.
One of those who noticed this was Adam, a young regular who came in five days a week.
Adam had this wonderfully dry way of supporting me and was friends with Colleen. When I started doing latte art, he pointed out that he'd been to Seattle and had already seen people doing it there. But it wasn't dismissive, even though he had a way of saying pithy things like that.
Adam was one of the earliest supportive customers who said out loud that I was leaving a fingerprint on the place.
There were a lot of customers like that. They weren't always polite, but they were direct, supportive and kind.
That's why one of the first espresso blends I created when I began my roastery was Linnaean St. Espresso.
That neighborhood watched me figure things out in real time. We tested things together and tried things out. They encouraged me to change the café program, came to my weird events, drank whatever new guest roaster I was excited about and gave me a reason to keep pushing.
Not long after I was on the path to becoming manager, though, Adam died suddenly.
His coworkers at Paper Source arranged a wake at Simon's. Maybe Simon had been told, but I hadn't.
So there I was, working through a rush with Colleen, making and serving drinks, when Adam's coworkers started flowing into the café to mourn him.
It was surreal. I didn't handle finding out in real time very well.
I've never forgotten that, even now, 20 years on.
Since then, I've gone on to host wakes and wedding proposals in my own café, and I understand much better now the importance these spaces can have for a community.
Back then, though, I was still trying to figure out how to make Simon's into the café I thought it could be.
At some point I became a manager, more or less in name only. Colleen left to become a nurse, and I was working a lot due to the level of press and attention the space was getting.
To remedy my constant discussions about the pay side of things, I was offered a percentage of revenue growth over the shop's historical numbers. Simon said: grow the business and get a percentage revenue share in what I was creating.
I took it because it was the only game in town.
And because I believed. I really believed.
The problem was, the business grew a lot.
The surprise was, in the end, the pay didn't.
When those numbers showed up, it was abruptly communicated to me that there wasn't enough money to pay me that percentage because how much I'd grown the business made it unsustainable.
That pretty much sucked.
Future me would've raised hell. Back then I didn't have the context to know better.
I didn't feel good, but I kept going for a while anyway. A few more incidents came up involving clashes with the roaster being used at the café, and eventually I'd had my fill.
But by then something much more important had happened.
I'd built a network of friends, customers and eventually some investors. Many of the people who had watched me learn and cheered on what I was trying to do at Simon's would become customers of barismo for years afterward.
So I left and built barismo. A small roaster in a tiny space in Arlington, just roasting bags and wholesale.
That was what I wrote then and this is what the more complete history looks like to me now, nearly two decades further down the road after some success, some burnout and real distance.
And leaving wasn't actually the end of my relationship with Simon's.
Later, I circled back and tried to get Simon's as a wholesale account. Even getting a small piece of the coffee program as a guest roaster took a huge push. A few years in, barismo eventually supplied most of the program.
I supported that coffee program, promoted the shop and its place in the community, organized events there and provided equipment. I took Simon with me to visit coffee farms in Guatemala. At one point I even offered to partner with Simon and merge our businesses.
He had cold feet, I guess. At the time, with him owning one shop and me having two cafés plus wholesale, the slice wasn't big enough for him.
So we stayed separate and kept doing business together.
And when Simon nearly died, we were there too.
He had a severe reaction to penicillin, developed sepsis and spent weeks at Spaulding recovering. While he was gone, we kept the coffee coming. We worked with his staff, coordinated what needed coordinating and helped keep things moving.
Whatever my history with Simon was, in my mind the shop was still full of people I'd known for years, and the place meant something to me.
Eventually Simon opened another location off Harvard Square. I supported that location too and tried to promote it, but it struggled and the vibe never really developed. The manager there later partnered with Simon to open 9 Bar in Davis Square, where they chose to use another startup roaster.
That was their business and their choice.
The problem for me came afterward.
When the Davis Square shop over-ordered coffee, more and more of that other roaster's coffee made its way back to Simon's to be used up. That meant Simon's was increasingly serving another roaster's coffee while using equipment I'd loaned to support our wholesale relationship.
I raised it several times, but it continued. Eventually barismo's volume at Simon's had dropped enough that the relationship no longer made sense to me.
So I pulled the equipment and barismo stopped supplying Simon's.
That was a long time ago.
Which brings me to Simon's closing now.
I'm not nostalgic about Simon Yu. And I'm not sad in the way you're supposed to be when an old café closes.
Because looking back, Simon wasn't really what made Simon's important to me.
The customers and the coworkers did.
They were the people who let me experiment in front of them. They drank the coffee. They showed up for events. They teased me when I got ahead of myself and encouraged me when I was onto something. They gave me an audience when I started writing. They became friends and supporters, investors and an audience.
A snapshot of humanity I was in need of at the time to help me believe in myself.
Some of them followed me when I left and became customers of barismo for years. Some have been part of my life in one way or another for more than two decades now.
I spent a lot of those early years thinking I was fighting to turn Simon's into the coffee shop I thought it could be.
I guess I wasn't.
I was actually figuring out who I was and learning to find my own version of authentic.
I still am, really. After several years of burnout, I'm slowly remembering that passion and refinding those skills, realizing that connection and that authenticity.
And those customers gave me the first space to do it.
Spaces can hold our hearts.
Maybe that's why I can feel something about Simon's closing now without feeling nostalgic about Simon.
The place held Adam.
It held all those regulars and their drinks programmed into the register. It held my weird events and early experiments. It held friendships, arguments, bad ideas and good ones. It held the person I was becoming before I knew what barismo would be, before I had a family, and before I found a home.
And before any of us, that same space held an indie video store below it that held a place in people's hearts.
When Mike and Virginia moved on and closed Irish Imports, or Linda closed Joie de Vivre, it closed an era in the neighborhood as well. I still think of them as regular customers and of the spaces that captured moments in time for me.
Buying a cape for my daughter that she wore daily until I passed it on to one of my regulars. Finding a vintage toy I included in a coffee swap with James Hoffmann.
The spaces were so deeply memorable in a neighborhood filled with them.
Not because of who owned them, but because of who we were when we went there, the people we met, and what those spaces allowed us to discover.
A lot of shop owners talk about giving back to the community or how coffee saved their lives, among many overly trodden marketing narratives.
For me, it's the spaces themselves that can be breathed to life by the cast of characters in them, not just the owner or a dedicated store manager building a program.
That's what I'll remember about Simon's the space.
The colors and design didn't change. The space barely changed over 20 years from the first day it changed owners. New gear, changing faces behind the bar, customers aging and families expanding.
People fell in love there. People mourned there. People grew up there. People hung out. People moved on.
These spaces hold all of it.
You can't bring that back because once it's gone, it will never be the same.
That's the bitter truth: you can open another coffee shop in the same room.
But more often than not, it will never be the same place.
