Morning Coffee: Spiderhouse
Sign in the parking lot of the Spiderhouse Café, Austin
On a blog dedicated to urbanism, it might seem sacrilegious to sing the praises of a coffeehouse that has its very own parking lot. But this is Texas we’re talking about, and allowances must be made.
More to the point, this is Austin we’re talking about — a low-slung, laid-back, liberal bastion in the middle of the lone star state — where the café is more central to community life than in any other North American city I have been to. The people of Seattle and Vancouver may love their coffee, but the people of Austin live at the café.
The Spiderhouse is located in an old house on the border between the university campus and the granola-crunching residential enclave of Hyde Park. It epitomizes the only civic movement to which Austin’s hippies and hipsters alike have dedicated themselves without reservation — an endearingly quixotic campaign to confront the forces of corporate homogenization and “Keep Austin Weird.”
In many contexts, self-conscious ‘weirdness’ comes across as kitschy at best, and at worst utterly contrived. Fortunately, the Spiderhouse rises immeasurably beyond this kind of affected idiosyncrasy. It is genuinely original and eclectic. It contains multitudes.
Climb the front porch stairs, pull back the creaky screen door, and you find yourself in a dimly-lit, wood-panelled interior. A framed reproduction of the Mona Lisa hangs above the counter, her famed countenance bathed in rosy neon glow. The small room to the left is furnished with a frat-house-hand-me-down living room set in faded green velour. The table is strewn with magazines, some decades old. The back room is lined with squeaky-leather booths from some late, lamented luncheonette.
Out on the sprawling patio, the air is hot and thick. Foliage drapes and fountains burble. Statues of nymphs stand mute among the sun-bleached skeletons of old bicycles and bird feeders. A crumbling gargoyle peers over the rim of a rusting bathtub. An antique gas pump flanks the small stage, and a wagon wheel with a missing spoke leans quietly in the corner. All the while, a tarnished suit of armour stands its wary watch beneath a faded 7-Up sign. There are coloured Christmas lights and lanterns strung overhead.
It is invariably crowded out here, but there always seems to be one free table in a prime people-watching spot. Some customers you just can’t figure, though. That scruffy guy with all the piercings and tattoos might be sleeping in the nearby ravine at night, or he might be a software engineer pulling down six figures at Dell or Motorola.
People of all walks come and go all day. They bring their kids. And their dogs. They read, or do their homework. They have a bite to eat. They always run into someone they know. They leave their laptops unattended while they go inside to visit friends or to wait in line for drinks. (There is always a line for drinks.) At night, they might wander around back, where there’s a projection screen and a small set of bleachers, to see if a show is playing. Occasionally a band will come on.
If the Spiderhouse has a flaw, it is that the coffee itself is virtually undrinkable. One might assume this to be a fatal flaw in a coffeehouse, but it is not necessarily so. Fortunately, they make a good Italian soda (that is, they use a good syrup rather than the inferior kind used by most coffee chains) and have a fine selection of Mexican beers. Even better than that, they sell Mexican Coke — the real thing: cane sweetened, in a glass bottle.
I must, however, close on a couple of sour notes. First, due to a computer crash last year, most of my Austin photos were lost. So, if you would like to see what the Spiderhouse looks like, I must point you to this Flickr photostream rather than my own work.
Second, I had originally intended this post to be about a trio of establishments that for me represented the essence of Austin café culture. However, it has been a year and a half since I lived in Austin, and I recently learned that the other two cafés I intended to feature have closed for good. They were both located along a section of Guadalupe St. known as “the Drag,” which has seen about half a dozen small, independent businesses close up shop in the past year.
Mojo’s Daily Grind, now out of business
One of the original rallying cries of the “Keep Austin Weird” movement was that “Austin has to choose between odd and mammon.” I only hope that these closures do not mean the choice has already been made.
Tags: Austin, Cafés, Morning Coffee
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Christopher DeWolf says:
Funny how the coffee in so many otherwise great cafes is mediocre.
October 20th, 2006 at 2:51 am