As Tilt Coffeeshop was visited by two (2) Cafe Tableauxists simultaneously, we decided to post dueling tableaux, as a sort of ‘He said, he said’ experiment - a look at the divergent, opposing, and/or confluent views of a shared experience:

This was the first shop I had visited with Thos. since Mani’s Santa Monica in the fall of 1998, about 9.5 years ago, that neither of us had previously visited. This experience was pretty much the same as that one, although fleshed out a bit more by 10 additional years of repertoire rehearsal. We bickered and picked the place apart while trash-talking about people like Grace Lau, who, I would imagine, we would have just begun complaining about 10 years ago at Mani’s. It doesn’t really bother me that so little has changed. It is pleasant in a way that there is a constancy in the personality of the independent coffeeshop, even the new ones that keep stacking up on top of each other in the gentrifying corners of the country, that refreshes my spirit like bullshitting with an old friend.
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poured in: Atlanta, Georgia

usually a place provokes a narrative of memories, a chain of things that had happened before the tether that place to a mess of things from the past. stringing those together in a text is best left to those with more time and those named proust. koffee is the first shop under my oeuvre of tableaux that was recommended to me by someone other than google, a former new havenianiter i suppose, im not quite sure. there was no description or reminiscence in the recommendation, just the name, which i had to follow up on google. so in a way it was still my find. rather than string all of the bits together i will just throw the coins on the table and see what they add up to. you will find the place yourself no doubt, or already have, and i would hate to ruin it for you; its a treat.
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poured in: Connecticut, New Haven

Autumn, near Halloween, in a strange town, strange to me and strange somewhat in its postured image for itself, on a Friday night and saturnine day, finds kooks aplenty roaming the streets. My colleague, who was in Seattle this same weekend, remarked that he saw people with the troll under the bridge made up and in costume, but who could say whether it was for Halloween or if he had in fact seen ‘the creature’ and its horde. In Asheville, the revelers were almost certainly of the seasonal ilk, and their self-conscious theatrics made for uncomfortable strolling but for delightful observation. Things were amiss, Bean Streets was gone, and of course, years in the grave, my beloved Interstate Motel only a memory. We stood in the window of Downtown Books & News late after closing looking for the cat who lived there and wondered whether bookstore cats actually live in the bookstores or whether they go to a home at night. He wasn’t there and we hypothesized that he had died in the couple of years since we had seen him last. Across the empty street lights were on in Izzy’s Coffee Den and I questioned whether I was ready for the new.
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poured in: Asheville, North Carolina