Bashing franchises ain't my thing. Caterwauling about the hegemony of Starbucks or the corporate ethos of Wal-Mart is silly. Customers, like employees, vote with their feet.

True, I avoid Starbucks if at all possible. Further, their coffee is over-roasted, their baked goods outsourced, and their merchandise-crammed stores programmed to within in an inch of their bleeding lives. Starbucks operates not coffeehouses, but revenue-generation units slathered with a veneer of community, and hipness.

When I watch a Tom Cruise movie, he is always so busy being Tom Cruise, his character portrayal fails, utterly, no matter how hard he tries. Likewise, in Starbucks, the Starbucks "experience," and brand, is overbearing.

But I'm not about to get all lathered up about that (as you can plainly see). You go where you want for a latte, and so will I. If I'm arranging a meeting with someone, and they want to hook up at a Starbucks, no problema. I'll take a Chai, please.

My idea of a proper coffeehouse is not one with overstuffed chairs and a fireplace by fiat to impute coziness (think Tully's). It's where there's barely enough room to sit; some unsafe music blaring (I walk out the door if I hear Gyspy Kings); plus distinct decor and feel.

Like Cafe Lladro on Upper Queen Anne and in West Seattle. Or especially Uptown Espresso in Lower Queen Anne, a cozy spot crammed with gilded mirrors and antique furniture, a kind of baroque - or would it be rococco? - coffeehouse.

These are local, small franchises, and I daresay I have higher hopes and expectations for them than for national franchises of any sort.

So it was dismaying and dissonant, to say the least, to discover yesterday that Uptown Espresso ("Home of The Velvet Foam") has opened a sprawling antiseptic outpost in my part of town (West Seattle).

It's in..........a former fish and chips franchise. Yes, they've moved into the old Skipper's, at the daunting confluence of Erskine Way SW, Edmonds Street SW, and California Avenue SW, in the southern end of West Seattle's neighborhood downtown, known as the "The Junction." For the boulevardier, the site stands trickily apart from the long commercial strip on California Ave.

Moreover, it's just too big inside, and even the walnut-stained furniture and antique-y pictures on the wall don't help. Nor does the green wall-to-wall carpeting. I feel like I'm in, well, a failed franchise restaurant masquerading as a coffeehouse. Whereas a storefront that used to house an accountant's office or even a pet grooming service doesn't have the same iffy karma.

Former IHoPs, Burger Kings, or gas stations turned into something else always carry a whiff of failure and confused identity in their next lives.

The Cavernous Antispetic Place That Used To Be Skipper's is close to the pending Seattle Monorail Green Line, which will run 14 miles from Northwest Seattle through many neighborhoods and downtown, then deep into Southwest Seattle (known as West Seattle). It begins operation in 2007.

So perhaps with the coming of the monorail, and the many commuters who will be boarding and debarking at The Junction, The Cavernous Antispectic Place That Used To Be Skipper's will make a lot of money.

If they stay open that long.

Posted by Matt Rosenberg at January 30, 2005 11:27 AM

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