Have you ever wanted to spend some time in virtual reality and get coffee at the same time? Up until now that’s been nearly impossible. Sure, you could get coffee in the virtual world—maybe in a tavern on the top of a hill—but you couldn’t actually drink it. You could be all like, “whooooooa, I actually feel like I’m holding a cup of coffee,” but that feeling wouldn’t map to your taste buds. For the residents of Santa Monica, that is changing thanks to goodboybob, a brand-new coffee shop attached to a virtual reality studio. And there are some pretty big names in coffee attached to it.
Opened yesterday on the corner of Broadway and 26th, goodboybob (stylized as all one word, all lowercase) was brought to life by Erich Joiner, the cofounder of ad agency/film studio/virtual reality creators Tool of North America. (Not to be confused, as we were initially, with the American prog-metal band Tool.) More visionary than coffee guy, Joiner enlisted the help of coffee consultant extraordinaire Tyler Wells to help create the program and Commonwealth Coffee Roasters co-founder and perennial US Barista Championship and Brewers Cup competitor Ryan Fisher to run it.
Oh yeah, and it’s attached to a virtual reality theatre. “I decided to open a coffee shop to offer great coffee and delicious food to the immediate community of writers, editors, and artists in the surrounding offices as well as locals who live and work in the area. It’s fun to have the bar share space with our VR theater as well,” Joiner states is a press release. “goodboybob can be the place to come grab a coffee and bump into someone you’ve never met before. I hope it will create opportunities for meaningful in-person conversation.”
In the real world, goodboybob will feature in-house roasted coffee for sale in black glass cylinders as well as Song Teas, nitro cold brew, pastries from Sugarbloom Bakery, and a daily rotating list of sandwiches made on Gjusta bread. According to the press release, the cafe will also showcase “a small collection of Joiner’s favorite things,” including Joseph Bentley garden sheers, a leather briefcase, and “a host of other curated rotating objects, all for sale.”
So residents of Santa Monica rejoice! You can grab coffee and pretend like you aren’t in Santa Monica (I can’t imagine why you’d want to; I know I wish I was in Santa Monica). For the rest of the world, we’ll have to wait until Tool creates a VR tour of goodboybob to experience the new cafe.
Are you excited about the coming dawn of virtual reality coffee shops? I know VR.
Zac Cadwalader is the news editor at Sprudge Media Network.
