From San Diego Free Press
It probably should come as no surprise that the diverse community of City Heights delivers up equally diverse coffee drinking experiences. The one unifying quality to the coffee here is a certain “robustness–” this IS City Heights after all. If you love the smell of coffee, the taste of coffee and the experience of drinking coffee in unpretentious cafes and restaurants, City Heights delivers on all counts.
I began my week with a hot Vietnamese coffee, pâté chaud and sharing a Vietnamese Special sandwich with my husband at Café Doré, so hot Vietnamese coffee with espresso and condensed milk it is for this week’s coffee column. The cafe is located in a strip mall off of University Avenue that includes a busy laundromat, a couple of Asian markets and a check cashing store. There is always a lot of activity outside the doorways too and along the long connecting sidewalk. The area doesn’t exude prosperity in the generic way we are too often accustomed to expect, but there is a richness there that generic simply can’t engender.
We’ve been going to Café Doré for decades and I had brought a list of questions pertinent to writing this column. I realized after posing my first question that the waiter, who has been there for years, doesn’t speak English any better than I speak Vietnamese. This affable man and I participate in that time honored tradition of Universal Eating, which is to say that we begin with smiles and hello’s and I go right to pointing to a number on the menu. I say the English translation, he nods and repeats in Vietnamese. It has worked splendidly.
For the remainder of this splendid article, please go directly to San Diego Free Press.
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