Memories of this charming little café Chip-a-Cookie
It is not, perhaps, that I was crazy about it, but this place was a pending account. A few years ago, this little cookie place was very fashionable and I often brought my daughter, who was much younger and, even today, is still a cookie freak. I remember they sold a coffee from Nescafe machines that was very good, although the chocolate they used was perhaps a bit too sweet. The mocaccino was my favorite. Going there was a fun sensory experience: since the place has always been very small, just by the aroma of the baking, you ate cookies even if you hadn't bought them.
I used to eat aroma cookies, while my daughter gorged herself on chocolate chip cookies. Then she went to study in another city and I stopped going. Coffee was too sweet to encourage me to go for it without extra encouragement and I'm not a big cookie eater.
A year or so ago, I noticed that this small place had changed its decoration, which, as I remember, was always nice, with a retro fairground or American café look from the fifties. Lots of scarlet red, lots of stripes and chubby letters that evoked cookies and donuts.
I remember they had a very nicely designed franchise to-go bag.
I don't know if my memory is accurate, but it sure is fond.
An aside on coffee machines
Reading about the history of coffee, I have learned about its origin and improvements between the end of the XIX century and the beginning of the XX century, to arrive at the famous espresso machines that we know today and that revolutionized the coffee culture in the world.
Although I have known espresso machines all my life, and I have been a fan of espresso since I first consumed coffee, I was only able to try a coffee from the Nescafe machines when I was a graduate student at the Universidad Simón Bolívar, in 2010. I had seen them and my friends liked them, but I was suspicious of them, because it seemed to me that an envelope coffee with a lot of sugar should not be to my taste.
Nescafe products are usually of high quality, compared to other mass consumption products, and they were the driving force behind the consumption of coffee as a supermarket product in 1930.
When I tried the first one, before a Literary Theory class, I wanted to try it again. And I fulfilled my wish in Cumaná, my hometown, in the company of an extraordinary friend, @marcybetancourt, who is a biologist, but has worked all her life in cultural institutions, especially in cinema. She really is an intelligent, upright, informed person, and with whom having a coffee is worth gold.
How kind and smiling the girls who prepare the coffee and cookies at Chip-a-Cookie. They kindly gave permission to publish their photo. And they are very pretty girls, too.In short, to drink a Nescafé (my favorite is the mokaccino) is to drink a coffee-based liquid dessert. You drink it like a classic coffee, and it's good. It is a quick way to consume a product that seduces as if it were high-end, but it is affordable.
I, in between memories, went a couple of days ago for that coffee at Chip-a-Cookie.
After a tiring and beautiful day with plants, which I will soon tell you about, I said to my daughter “Why not?” And we relived her childhood days.
We recalled that day, while eating excellent cookies and, to my disappointment, drinking a watered-down Nescafé, with not enough chocolate and too much sweetness, that we first came to this coffee shop after buying one of the Harry Potter books. We felt like celebrating and read the first few pages in this café.Today, the bookstore is still nearby as a temptation to linger.
This day my daughter was in a clownish mood and I couldn't even take a decent picture of her.
What's left of the coffee shop I used to nostalgically remember?
The colorful cookies as if they came out of a fairy's oven. The aroma that fills your coffee with the magic of the elves even if it is watery. The very white, the very red. The pristine light.
I believe, and this is not out of romanticism, that no coffee is bad with good company. I have returned to cafés of infamous taste to meet friends and we have spent wonderful afternoons, even if the coffee has remained in the glasses. That is how unpalatable they were.
I don't think I'll go back to Chip-a-Cookies for coffee. I'll go back for the souvenirs and the cookies.
I'll come back for the intimate, minimalist experience of its atmosphere. For the light and the hearts.
Wellcome always.