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Small Pleasures: Global warming
[Times photos: Chris Zuppa]
Diana Riffe, who works at the Globe Coffee Lounge, fills an order for a flavored latte. |
By CHRIS SHERMAN, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published November 14, 2002
At the Globe Coffee Lounge, the comfort food of childhood plus homey surroundings and good company warm customers' hearts as well as their tummies.
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ST. PETERSBURG -- The Globe styles itself a coffee lounge to make sure you know that it's not as hyper as a coffee bar, more decadent and decidedly uncorporate. No corporate logos need apply. The Bunn-O-Matic on the Bless This Coffee shrine and Globe Goddess baseball shirts are enough.
Coffeehouse in the old cool-cat sense is closer to it, for the Globe caters to starving artists, magnetic poets, spoken-word speakers and art-film fans. It's best described as a coffeehome. The coffee may be Good Karma beans bought from sensitive growers and locally roasted, but it comes with lots of sugar -- and milk and chocolate and caramel. There's even espresso con Coca-Cola (ask for La Bomba).
For all its worldly airs and twisted takes, the Globe is so homey in its ooey gooey cakes, Formica tables, comfy-ugly sofas and Nick at Nite warmth at all hours that we are all children here.
There is black beans and rice, a creamy portobello soup and tomato mozzarella on panini, but it comes on a Melmac plate with pretzels or tortilla chips, the kind of unbalanced garnish an exasperated mom would let kids fix themselves.
Much of the limited menu comes direct from the recipe box of a late 20th century childhood: peanut butter and jelly, baked ziti thick as a brick, eggplant Parmesan served on a hamburger bun. Then there's the counter of endless, shameless pastries and cakes dripping with chocolate and caramel, Rice Krispie treats, s'mores and other goodies.
The food comes straight from the crockpot, microwave, George Foreman grill and home baking talents of owner Joellen Schilke. Schilke is a Renaissance figure, on-air art maven for WMNF-FM 88.5, political activist, veteran downtown believer and namesake of the SloppyJoellen, barbecue chicken with pepperjack cheese on focaccia.
It was her ideas, flea market finds and love of bubbles that made this place, open for three years. If there were chain money, she'd probably have a lot more old globes and enough album covers of Herb Alpert's Whipped Cream & Other Delights to paper a wall.
There are a few vegetarian faves, but I'd like to see more salads and a few things that remember photosynthesis: celery and carrot sticks, maybe, or even pickles. It might horrify the porkophobes, but the rest of us would love a BLT. With a glass of lemonade!
And the menu of savories is limited. One day, two of three specials were made with turkey, and they ran out of turkey. But it's hard to complain when you feel as if you're in the kitchen of a favorite aunt who gives you and your cousins free rein.
There's no alcohol, a reminder that you used to be able to have fun without it -- and people do here, up to 3:30 a.m.
The Globe is serious proof that art and tolerance, diversity and originality, can bloom in beautiful downtown St. Petersburg -- and must. Skateboarders and board gamers hang out here, a rainbow of middle-age folks get a kick out of the place, and even construction workers with real tattoos like a sloppy sandwich.
Although it's rarely crowded, you'll feel safe at home, never alone or weird. Not in a family like this.
Downtown St. Petersburg’s Globe Coffee Lounge offers food, fun and fraternity as well as coffee.
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The Globe Coffee Lounge
- 532 First Ave. N
- St. Petersburg
- (727) 898-JAVA
- www.geocities.com/globecoffeelounge/
- Hours: 6-11 p.m. Mon., 11 a.m.-11 p.m. Tue. through Thur., 11 a.m.-3:30 a.m. Fri., 6 p.m.-3:30 a.m. Sat. Brunch: ll a.m.-2 p.m., last Sunday of each month.
- Details: No alcohol, no reservations, no smoking on Wednesdays or before 7 p.m. other days.
- Special features: Starving artist vegetarian specials Monday nights.
- Prices: $3 to $5.
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