Tov Coffee, a review

Portland has a very distinctive retail infrastructure, one that elicits strange, public rituals and leads to experiences of unbridled, non-value add whimsy.

An example of this: rounding the corner at SE 32nd and Hawthorne, one encounters a small parking lot dominated by a red, double-decker bus that houses, you guessed it, a coffee shop.

It has tables, like a restaurant

Tov Coffee is much like every other food cart in Portland: larger than food trucks in other cities and just as questionably mobile. But Tov is so much more than a "mobile" retail space for upscale casual dining: it's its own vibrant, fully immersive world.

Close, but not too close, quarters

I was overwhelmed by the density of build-out and human activity in the back-half of the lower-level. Two baristas, a commercial espresso machine, and at least 3 people waiting on drinks -- it shouldn't all fit, not this comfortably, but it does. The custom purple paint job, which extends to the espresso machine frame, is gorgeous. The Egyptian adornments effortlessly add to the sensation of otherness. One thinks of astronauts in Apollo spacecraft safely encased within what was tantamount to several sheets of aluminum -- you're here, and the outside world is preciously proximate, yet ever so far away.

The upper-level is a tented seating area decorated like a Maghrebi sitting room. It's cute and inviting, a variant of the type of room every coffee shop in Portland has, the requisite space where people are invited to luxuriate for hours on end. The partial exposure to the sky adds a welcome breeziness to the usual feeling of being socked in from the elements.