What’s in your closet? In that bottom drawer or box in the basement? If it’s brightly colored, even garish and of little practical use, it’s a candidate for Nostalgia, the recently opened vintage gear and coffee house in Union Square.
Union Square, like a lot of Cambridge and Somerville, is itself rather out of time and place, diverse in its layers of commerce and habitation. Chain shops and restaurants are few. You can find coffee with English muffins (Vinal), coffee in an old bank (Bloc) and coffee with brunch (Juliet). There are wursts with beer (Bronwyn), a cozy bar tucked in an alley with an excellent selection of Japanese whiskies (Backbar), a variety of Peruvian establishments and many other places of sustenance and character.
Coffee goes with lots of things. Cafés (remembering my adolescent attempt to serve coffee in the basement of Harvard Square’s Starr Bookstore) have often been associated with books and writing (I’m sitting with a cup next to me as I write this). For me, sitting down to read a book often means first brewing a cup. Why does the association seem so natural? Readers want coffee, so it’s available in several local bookshops: George Howell in Lovestruck Books & Cafe in Harvard Square and Page & Leaf at Porter Square Books, most prominently.
Perhaps what is more interesting is when books show up in cafés. I see them in Zing, for purchase and browsing, and in one of the interesting little back rooms of Bloc, along with some board games. A shelf with books next to your table where you are sipping a cappuccino may cause you to ignore the phone or laptop and forage for a serendipitous find. Board games might lead a group to spend more time and money in a shop. Some cafés have books, including highly geeky technical manuals, about coffee (one recent find in such a café in London was my own book on Japanese coffee, so I was rather chuffed).
Sometimes the conjunction defines the place, as at Nostalgia, which I visited this past weekend. Is it a vintage shop with coffee, or is it a coffee shop with vintage stuff? There is a coffee bar toward the back, but first you run a gantlet of clothes on racks, sneakers mounted high near the ceiling, shelves of VHS tapes, cassettes and CDs, and games and robots dating from my son’s childhood.
What matters to me, of course, is coffee. Here it is from Onyx and my drip cup (medium roast) from a freshly brewed pot was excellent. Onyx, from Rogers, Arkansas, is new to me, and I’m going back to sip through the range on offer. This includes pour-overs at connoisseur prices (specialties at $6 per cup and a high-end reserve gesha at $11). I found the drip well balanced, a bit darker than my own definition of medium, but a cup for consideration.
The seriousness of the coffee service contrasts with the sometimes sheer silliness of the goods on the shelves and racks, making sipping while browsing truly amusing. There’s a stack of comics with my childhood favorites, Archie and Veronica, on top. There’s a magnetized tic-tac-toe game mounted near the sofa. On an Emerson TV, a Tom Cruise VHS plays. Why in the world is a bottle of cologne marked “smells like WD-40”? There is a single Louboutin red-soled 4-inch spike-heeled shoe on a shelf. Whimsy to the max. And above all, bright and colorful.
Nostalgia and vintage are words worth investigation. I asked John Maroney, the coffee consultant, brewer and espresso drawer, what era he thought the merchandise here evokes. In my view the stock seems specific and aimed at a particular (and sometimes ironic) audience. He said “the 1990s,” which seemed right, although plenty there is from the ’80s. My own nostalgia nerve endings light up at goods much older. If I see a car with an “antique” license plate and it’s not from the 1950s or earlier, I think it’s cheating.
Vintage goods (relative to one’s experience and history) often invoke nostalgia. Nostalgia is a highly personal emotion, focused usually on an object, a song or a food rather than on an era or a cultural phenomenon such as “impressionism.” Is it, as Merriam-Webster emphasizes, “a sad pleasure experienced in recalling what no longer exists”? But they do exist, those pressed-tin toys, that musty fur coat. We cannot relegate them completely to the past. They may, however, make us wish for earlier times. For me, the tape playing on the small screen of the Emerson TV implied the ease of older technologies. Life was simpler when all you had to do was pop a cassette into the slot in front of the box. To have entertainment be that easy now would certainly reduce my sadness at the demise of true user-friendliness.
Without further wallow in nostalgia, there is a draw for me here beyond “vintage.” It is my wry love of anyone’s kitsch, things that have appeal through their out-of-placeness. But a real bonus for me in this place of cheerful chaos, of brightly colored goods and clothing, is that the coffee is not vintage and is most excellent. It goes well with the Archie comic book.
Nostalgia, 322 Somerville Ave., Union Square, Somerville (9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday; 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. Tuesday to Saturday; 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday)
Corky White, a food anthropologist at Boston University, has lived in Cambridge since 1953 with long sojourns in Japan. She has written articles on coffee for Standart Magazine and books including “Cooking for Crowds” (in its 40th Anniversary edition) “Coffee Life in Japan” and, with her son, Ben Wurgaft, “Ways of Eating.” Corky is grounded in coffee and welcomes suggestions at cwhite@csindie.com.
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