There’s something to be said, I think, about waking up on the right side of the bed.
Well, there’s no bed involved in this experience and there’s no real ‘waking up’ going on, per se. Instead, it was how the day started (because of one employee at Prado Café on Commercial Drive) that my day fired on all cylinders from that point on.
It was a sunny Sunday morning in Vancouver and I had a meeting on ‘The Drive’ with a business that has been following timinganddelivery.com for a few months and was interested in partnering. I should tell you that I enjoy taking these meetings from time-to-time if my schedule permits. What I haven’t yet told you, though, is that this particular meeting was early and, me being me, was in dire need of my Americano misto ‘fix’.
If you need some background, allow me to rewind the clock a little and showcase a few examples of where and where not to go when you are seeking ‘your’ coffee experience in Vancouver (or Whistler, if that’s where you find yourself).
In fact, I recently discovered that Prado Café sources coffee from the 49th Parllalel! How cool is that? Props to chinese broccoli for the photo, by the way.
Prado Café, if you haven’t been, is what I like to call a minimalist coffee experience. Picture a warehouse/lofty/industrial/bricks-n-sticks layout (although, I didn’t see any bricks) with just enough furniture to make George Orwell wake up and take notice. Then, throw in a scattering of tables and some pretty hip clientele (you know what I mean…imacs, books, bongo drums, and the like…artistic types!). I have really gotten into the whole Commercial Drive ‘vibe’ lately and Prado Café is just another extension of this.
Anyway, I’ll leave it to your good judgement to:
-
check out Prado Café;
-
continue to frequent it, if you’re a regular; or
-
do absolutely nothing with what I’ve just wrote.
Let me just say this…as soon as I got up to the counter, the person taking my order (is that a Barrista if it’s outside the Starbucks world?) looked at me and before I could open my mouth, she said “Americano Misto, right?”.
Ummm…what?!
How in the world did she know that? I don’t know, nor do I care. Well, maybe I do. This experience sticks out like Javier Bardem did at the Oscars! Like a whack of pressurized air to the forehead, I was shocked (and still alive). Not only was she really good and delivered on what she promised very promptly, the coffee and the experience was fantastic.
The Prado Café blew the doors (and locking mechanism) off in terms of my expectations from a small, independent coffee shop and I’ll surely be back to check in and see if they’ve been replaced.
darren
0 Responses to “prado cafe (on commerical drive)”