Juan Salcito is a Napa local who, at age 19, is community-building—in a coffee shop. It’s where he works and where I go with friends, the Napa Valley Coffee Roasting Company. Locally owned and operated, the Roasting Company has been serving coffee on the corner of Main and First streets for the past 27 years. Walk in, and you feel the presence of low-key friendliness in a Victorian storefront where you can sip a Cappuccino—with or without your beret—watching from the window seat as tourists march by, desperately seeking Starbucks, newly opened across the street. Locals (Juan and myself among them) feel loyalty to “our” Roasting Company, where the air is rife with aroma of coffee beans, roasted a few miles up the road in St. Helena, where a bulletin board announces local happenings, and where the walls display paintings and photographs by Napa artists. There is no pushy merchandising here, just coffee and conversation. Juan tells me he wants to revive a music night in the coffee shop so teens can have a place to congregate and express themselves, and a poetry night so older patrons can do the same. Now that’s exceptional service. 938 Main St., Napa. 707.224.2233.
The 25 Days Project is an online series through the month of December spotlighting some of our favorite local businesses. Read more about the project here, and about our commitment to shopping locally here.
Nothing makes you feel more like a relic than reading and relishing a massive oral history of Music Television. Craig Marks and Rob Tannenbaum assembled hundreds of pages of recollections of the network, and there’s a buried memory trip every few millimeters. Because yes, the book covers the years 1981 to 1992, but if you were alive and young and watching television then, I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution isn’t about bands, or music videos, or the birth of reality television, or pop culture. It’s about you.
