Breakfasting at the Capital One Café

AJ Mastav
4 min readMay 19, 2023
Stock photo of a Capital One Cafe — or any other sterile storefront with an espresso machine and a jumbo-sized container of floor wax

If there’s a polar opposite to the kind of underground, lefty, beat-poet-ridden coffee shop that American cities reliably produced from the 1950s to the early 2000s, the Capital One Board of Directors has perfected it with the Capital One Café.

The café as a hangout for dissidents, rebels, and poets is not an American invention. The English and French Revolutions both have conspiratorial coffee…

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AJ Mastav

Professional planner, unprofessional writer. Member of the American Institute of Certified Planners. Also, a former Sunday School teacher.