0.9 Breaking out

I was not the only one being hectored by the kids upstairs. On my infrequent days in the office, I shared a cubicle with Kathryn Robinson, an ebullient and brilliant young woman who was energetically chronicling Greater Seattle’s emerging upscale retail and restaurant scene. She was by no means, however, a Greater Seattle enthusiast.

On her way in to work every morning, she would stop at an espresso stand in Raison d’Être, a hipper-than-thou restaurant on the ground floor of our building, and buy a latte. The youngsters working the stand would regale her with their visions of future glory. “We’re in a band that’s going to be huge….” She would pat them on the head indulgently and come upstairs. “That Jeff Ament,” she liked to say, “makes the best lattes…but does he have to talk about his band every single morning ?”

The late 1980s and early 1990s were incredibly busy years for Robinson. Until then, Seattle had had so few restaurants to be taken seriously that Brewster and his new managing editor, Katherine Koberg, used to sit in meetings every week in a panic because there were no restaurants to review. “Then,” Koberg recalled years later, “there suddenly were ten new restaurants opening every week . It was like it changed overnight.” Robinson, who had grown accustomed to working at leisure for weeks at a time on an occasional story about a new restaurant, store, or trend, now found herself cranking out copy at an almost suicidal pace. She was covering the rapid transformation of downtown Seattle—once a moribund mix of slums, low-rent office buildings and out-of-scale new skyscrapers—into a Scene replete with national retailers (Anne Taylor, Abercrombie and Fitch, Barneys New York, Victoria’s Secret), high-end downtown shopping malls (Westlake Center, Pacific First Centre, that spelling of “Center” being symptomatic of the city’s grander turn toward pretension), and what came to be called “new downtown concept restaurants” (Palomino, Raison d’Être…).

In 1989, Robinson wrote a Weekly cover story highlighting the degree to which the forces of Greater Seattle were winning the battle for control of the city’s destiny. The story, about Starbucks as it was poised to leap from the regional to the national market, was filled with telling details—most of them supplied by a voluble Howard Schultz, who now is Starbucks’ CEO and at the time was the company’s marketing director—signaling the dramatic change both in Starbucks and the national definition of “Seattle.”

When Gordon Bowker moved on from the defunct Seattle Magazine in 1971 to co-found Starbucks with his friends Jerry Baldwin and Zev Siegl, Seattleites interested in good coffee were resigned to driving three hours north, to Vancouver, British Columbia, to buy coffee from Murchie’s, a gourmet coffee and tea shop that enjoyed legendary status in Seattle. Bowker and his partners wanted to build a homegrown Murchie’s. Their first store, on the edge of the Pike Place Market, sold tea, spices, catnip, and dark-roasted coffee beans that brewed a robust, black, thick beverage with a tremendous kick. They learned the technical arcana of roasting coffee—and a great deal of the marketing and mythology around it as well—from Alfred Peet, the Dutch-born Berkeley, California, founder and owner of Peet’s Coffee, where all three apprenticed. Customers entering that first Starbucks store were served by salespeople steeped in coffee lore. Starbucks was as much an evangelist for good coffee as it was a retail operation; customers during the 70s, whether buying beans or ground coffee, often were treated to lectures that made them feel like they should be paying tuition. I took to drinking Starbucks almost immediately—even having it shipped to Ann Arbor during our years in exile—and knew full well what Robinson meant in her piece when she quoted an observer of Starbucks devotees as saying, “They’re not just drinkers, they’re disciples.”