Chomp!

By Ron Aiken

 

Floodwaters, Local Buzz and the Coffee Wars

First, Chomp! was extremely blessed to be spared from the horrific, life-changing destruction of last week’s flooding. Having seen the destruction first-hand in Chomp!’s old neighborhood of Coldstream alone, it is with a heavy heart that I count my blessings and wish others well.

In fact, the only way the flooding impacted me negatively, aside from adding an additional 20 minutes to my daily commute thanks to the road I live on being closed, was that I did not have access to Americanos downtown thanks to the boil water advisory, which took out the capacity for such at my go-to, walking-distance purveyor, Immaculate Consumption.

This led Chomp! to re-think his choices. For coffee in general, I’m a Drip lover, IMMAC lover and Starbucks lover. Those are the places Chomp! goes and feels happy. But what about Cool Beans, you say? Chomp! pondered this the other day and realized he’d been remiss in visiting a business that had been there in its location since his college days, which these days seem like they happened in the Eisenhower Administration.

How could Chomp! have not been all over these folks with love and patronage? I made up my mind, and the wife and I walked over and up the stairs to the business all ready to fall all over ourselves with happiness.

This is the part where the opposite of that happened.

Without calling out the person’s name, I’ll say that the customer service and attitude of the hair-dyed barristress was beyond indifferent to the point of rude. Chomp! is a happy guy. His wife is the most professional, courteous person He has ever met. We’re cool people. We make people happy because we engage with positivity.

Unless you meet us with disdain, aloofness, mumbling and terrible basic customer service skills. You should know that should you make this choice in life and are unfortunate enough to encounter Chomp!, Chomp! will enforce your decisions to his audience, however meager it may be.

Of course she was right, and it was disappointing. It reminded Chomp! that it’s precisely customer service that keeps him going back to Drip, IMMAC and even Starbucks, where the crew at Woodhill Mall is superb and kind.

I love interacting with people who love what they’re doing. A staff who thinks they’re better than their customers, that the customers are an inconvenience, is a staff looking for work and a business doomed to stagnate.

ALL OF WHICH IS TO SAY THIS: The Local Buzz on Rosewood, in the little strip mall to the left of the Rosewood Dairy Bar and across the street from Publix, is a fantastic find.

 

It’s hard to spot from the road, but worth it.

 

Chomp! was there for an interview with a local who just discovered it – it’s been open less than a month now. As arrived before the friend did, Chomp! had an issue with his Jeep’s conditioning and was looking under the hood in the parking lot. After fiddling around like he knew what he was doing in his best impersonation of his equally mechanically uninclined dad, he closed the hood back with only a few knowing head shakes and dirty hands to show for the effort.

As I was looking at my hands and drying to clean them off, out walks a young man who I will learn is Alex Williamson, a son of The Local Buzz owner Stephanie Bridgers, offering me a bottled water with which to clean my hands.

That’s customer service, and I wasn’t even yet a customer; in fact, I wasn’t even parked in front of the place but a couple of businesses down. He just saw me, saw a need and met it with kindness expecting nothing in return.

Interestingly enough, that’s precisely how The Local Buzz, a coffee place, ice cream shop, homemade-food restaurant and community-gathering place got started, Bridgers told me. A longtime Shandon resident, she and her family saw a need in the Rosewood area for a quality coffee place and made it happen. Her food is terrific – her menu features killer sandwiches, salads, wraps and souls (the soup of the day when I was there was spinach, kale and parmesan) and the emphasis is on local.

The coffee is from Turtle Creek (http://www.turtlecreekcoffee.com/), the ice cream is from Sweet Cream (http://sweetcreamcompany.com/) and their pastries are from The Silver Spoon (http://www.silverspoonbakeshop.com/).

Inside, the vibe is funky/eclectic with lots of comfortable seating, even a huge couch, and in addition to board games on the shelves there’s also a registered Little Free Library.

 

Everything about the interior is warm.

 

A patron nearby our table, when she heard Bridgers and I talking, couldn’t help but chime in about what a godsend the shop was to the community as a place to get great coffee and food, enjoy free wifi and just unwind in an atmosphere that pulls the stress right out of you, starting with an incredibly friendly, generous and thoughtful staff.

If you haven’t been, GO NOW. If for no other reason than to try a bag of these chocolate treats, from a coffee farm in Hawaii that Williamson has worked at and will be returning to soon.

 

It took all of about 30 seconds to finish this bag.

 

One last thing – they were making espressos even with the advisory using bottled water because that’s just the kind of people they are. I’ll be seeing A LOT of them in the future, and I hope you will, too.

A WORD ABOUT WORDS

Chomp! realizes without your telling him that he goes between first- and third-person ALL THE TIME WITH NO RHYME OR REASON. He knows this. I know this. Together, it is known. And yet, why do I do it? Because Chomp! is all about whimsy, my friends. He is a slave to it. Whimsy is Chomp!’s BFF, his master, his muse. And what a glorious leader it is.

Not coincidentally, I tend to find that the people in life MOST OPPOSED to whimsy in general are grammarians. Being generous, Chomp! extends an invitation to those troubled souls to embrace the chaos, the uncertainty, the happy joy that giving in to whatever, whenever, brings, whether grammatically, syntactically, semantically or otherwise. Til next time!

 

 

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