Ground Up

Michael Idov: "I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life."

A CRACK IN HIS CUPS

Owning and operating a small, arty café in a hip part of town is one of the ubiquitous middle-class dreams -- right up there with planting a vineyard or turning one's heritage home into a friendly little B & B.  However, as with all such fantasies, once the romance is tamped out, there's a lot of grit left to deal with.

At least, that was the discovery of Michael Idov, a cultural journalist for New York Magazine, the New Republic and a number of Moscow-based publications, who in a Slate essay documented the failure of Café Trotsky, a coffee salon he and his wife Lily had attempted to run in New York's trendy Lower East Side in 2005.

As described in the article, the small business foray was a financial experiment so stressful to the couple's relationship that he credits only its inevitable bankruptcy for the salvation of their imploding marriage.

According to a recent profile in Time Out NY, the Slate piece prompted several offers from book publishers who envisioned a prickly Anthony Bourdain-style manual on "How Not to Run a Cafe", but Idov's literary conception was something more darkly roasted. Instead of the usual auto-biographical rendering, he reworked the material of his entrepreneurial experience into the satirical tale of Mark Scharf and Nina Liau, a couple of boho-esque trustifarians with an innocent idea of commercial realities and a cast of easily identifiable East Side customer types at their unfortunately named, Café Kolshitzky.

The wind up moral of the story -- something inspired by a quote from Bourdain himself: "Woe is the business for whom one enters for love."

Ground Up launches in book stores today and is available by mail order from Amazon.com.  Sip and savour.  It's a rich, bitter and highly caffeinated brew.