Though Grumpy Cat may not be taking over Caffe Medici during South By Southwest in Austin for a third consecutive year, the week-long festival of art, music, and corporations trying to prove their hep with kids daddi-o will still have a coffee and pop-culture mashup that you can wait in hours-long lines for and ultimately be slightly disappointed by. This year, Twin Peaks’ Double R Diner will be coming to life for two days only, and they will be dishing out free coffee and pie. Kind of.
Cynicism about SXSW being just a corporate shill fest in the guise of a once-great music experience aside, the Double R Diner pop-up still sounds half-cocked. According to Eater Austin, the Double R will be serving cold brew from High Brew Coffee (the jabronis always tryna hawk their wares at my climbing gym. I’m good, bro, I promise) and Tiny Pies, who make… well, you can probably figure that out. As Eater astutely notes, cold brew and anything but a big ole America-style slice of cherry pie are not canon to the beloved cult classic. You might as well have a guest appearance by police sergeant Dan Grouper to talk about how “darn satisfactory” the coffee is. It’s like they saw how Netflix half-assed their Gilmore Girls’ Luke’s Diner pop-up and thought, “yeah, we can limbo under that bar.”
And Austin-via-Portland’s Voodoo Doughnut will be there making some sort of special donut thing, I guess because they, like the show, are from the Pacific Northwest even though the two entities are from wildly different parts of the actually not-at-all monolithic region of the United States. But whatever. Like I said, no cynicism.
Anyway, if you still want to check out Double R Diner and don’t care much about attention to detail, then get ye to Rainey Street in Austin March 16th and 17th, next door to The Showtime House taking over the Clive Bar. And don’t forget: RSVPs are required but don’t guarantee entry, because you gotta dance if you wanna get the attention of your corporate overlords.
Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.
*top image via Twin Peaks Facebook
