In summer, the garage-door front walls at the Richmond Beach Coffee Co. roll up to let in the sun. On winter days, those walls, made mostly of windows, comfortingly shut out the cold and let in a diffused light.
The cafe is a place you can linger, with white walls, framed historic pictures, wooden tables and plump sofas.
Perhaps that’s why this past Sunday near noon, it was almost full, with parents and two grown children gathered around a table, a few lone suburbanites on their laptops and two teen girls conversing. When another young girl walked in, they exclaimed with delight, not having seen her in “forever!”
Meanwhile, the amicable baristas pulled drinks, apologized about waits and commented on the light coming in from outside.
The cafe offers the standard coffee, espresso, tea and Chai drinks, along with frappes, Italian sodas, cold sandwiches, pastries and soup.
I went for the 2 percent latte, which was deliciously full bodied, high quality and unbitter, needing neither sugar nor additional cream. (Something of a rarity in the cafe world.)
My dining companion, more adventurous, ordered the egg nog Chai latte, which tasted a little bit like the holidays and a lot more like gym floor cleaner.
The other limited-time-only holiday choices sounded more appealing: peppermint mocha, butter rum egg nog latte and pumpkin spice latte.
The limited pastry selection offers fruit tarts in tiny pie crusts, maple bar donuts, chocolate brownies and a few other offerings.
Among them, the cherry sour cream coffee cake was wonderfully buttery and just sweet enough, with the gooey accent of jelly-donut style filling. True to its name, it went impeccably with the coffee.
We tried — unsuccessfully — not to eat too much of it while waiting for our half sandwiches, which, when they came, looked more like three fourths.
The tuna had a nice smattering of dill and the roast beef had a tangy, mustardy savor to it. They were standard cafe fare: simple, cold and mostly just an accompaniment to the cafe’s other offerings.
We found ourselves, full on hot drinks and half a piece of coffee cake, unable to eat more than half our halfs, but the baristas cheerfully brought us Saran Wrap to package them away.
The cafe has another advantage: it’s near Richmond Beach Saltwater Park, a beach with a beautiful vista and vegetation that grows underneath a railroad bridge.
We stopped there after leaving the cafe and the cold wind coming over an almost surfable Puget Sound nearly blew us away.
We stood there as long as we could (a few minutes) then turned back, vowing to return to both cafe and beach when the air and the winds were more gracious.
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