Coupa Cafe, 538 Ramona Street, Palo Alto, California
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Coupa Cafe, 538 Ramona Street, Palo Alto, California
In September, while on a visit to California, I spent a long weekend with my old friend Mistah Rick up in Oakland. One evening we spent the night with Vicky, a mutual old friend who lives down the peninsula in Menlo Park. In the morning we decided to take the border collies, Colleen and Sarah, for a walk to Palo Alto, where we planned to have an al fresco breakfast.
Palo Alto was named for a large redwood tree marking the spot where a 1769 expedition set up camp. The city was eventually incorporated in 1894, several years after Stanford University was founded in honour of Leland Stanford Junior. Today Palo Alto is the home of the headquarters of HP, Tesla Motors, and Skype and has contributed to the growth of many nearby tech companies including Facebook, Google, Logitech, Intuit, PayPal, and Pinterest. Not surprisingly, Palo Alto is one of the most expensive cities in the US in which to reside.
(There are a couple of amusing Mitchell Family coincidences here. Palo Alto means "tall tree" in Spanish, and the term "tall trees" was a family in-joke related to my father. The other coincidence is that my brother and I attended Stanford Junior High School in Long Beach. But nobody in my family has ever lived in Palo Alto or, somewhat regretfully, never even set up a highly successful tech company. I guess that's why I write online about coffee and beer...)
When we reached Palo Alto we decided to have breakfast at Coupa Cafe. Located in a building dating from the 1930s, the cafe was opened by Jean Paul and Capelia Coupal, both originally from Venezuela and both who earned degrees at Stanford University. Coupa Cafe has become a popular spot for Silicon Valley techies, venture capitalists, and superstars including Apple's Steve Jobs and Sergey Brin, who co-founded Google. Not surprisingly, the cafe has accepted Bitcoin as payment since it was developed.
As we had the dogs with us we sat outside on the front patio and ordered breakfast and coffee drinks. My cappuccino, ordered with an extra shot, was smooth as silk. Vicky's caramel latte was translated by the barista as Marron, which is a Venezuelan latte, so she had to add quite a bit of sugar to make it similar to the sweet drink she was expecting. All the coffee drinks are brewed with fair trade coffee sourced, not surprisingly, from Venezuela.
The food menu features empañadas, cachapas (sort of like corn crumpets), pastries, crepes, and various speciality dishes. For breakfast Vicky had a BLT bagel, Rick had an arepa -- basically a flat round maize patty that can be cooked in various ways -- and I had the breakfast crepe, which was a huge rather dry buckwheat crepe filled to the brim with scrambled eggs. It was big enough to feed four of me. I probably should have ordered something else...
I wish I could provide more details about the cafe and the menu, but Coupa's website doesn't work. Whenever I've tried it over the course of the past two months, on various browsers and on my phone, I get the same error page saying access is restricted to administrators. I emailed them once about this but never received a reply. Perhaps somebody else will have better luck.
Speaking of electronic communications brings to mind an extremely recent Facebook posting session that is still going on:
I’ve already eaten 1 banana today and then I’ll be back to see what it sounds like and what it was about and then we can get a good job.Related Links