Will Vegas be the next big city to experience the global coffee kablooey? When you stop and think for a second, the City of Neon has everything: all-night party culture, upscale tourists happy to drop a buck, wage-slave casino employees in need of a cup to start / end their shifts, luxury experiences, adventure capitalists…we’re shocked it hasn’t happened already. Turns out so are the folks at the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
From the Las Vegas Review-Journal:
Las Vegas is world-famous for late-night dining, early-morning drinking and 24-hour partying, but the city that never sleeps isn’t even ranked on lists of America’s most caffeinated cities.
According to a July report from market research firm NPD Group, Seattle tops the list of coffee-drinking cities. Denver; Austin, Texas; Anchorage, Alaska; and Portland, Ore., are in the top 12. Vegas is nowhere to be found — yet.
The presence of a local coffee roaster is a step forward for Las Vegas’ coffee culture, said John Ynigues, owner of Grouchy John’s coffee shop. Java-centric cities like San Francisco and Seattle have far more independent coffeehouses and an abundance of roasters to supply them. Many shop owners also roast their own beans. That hasn’t yet happened in Las Vegas.
“It’s the next logical step, I think,” Ynigues said. “In order to be diverse enough to grow that culture, we have to have that type of thing (roasters), also, not just small independents using the same bean.”
Newspapers in Vegas? Now we’ve heard everything. But thanks, LV Journal Review, for steering our discussion in an interesting direction. We’ll put the odds of someone opening a roasting outlet in Las Vegas at approximately 1000 to 1, but as the tastes and trends in Las Vegas veer more towards the fine dining specturm, we could definitely imagine a smart little cafe spot opening up somewhere on the strip. Why hasn’t Todd Carmichael duped someone into ponying up the 100k? Can’t you see it?
Blue Bottle, Caesar’s Palace; La Colombe, Venetian; Caffe Vita, Circus Circus (with family-style pizza for the whole brood!); 9th Street Espresso, New York New York; and so on and so forth.
A roaster? Unlikely. High-end coffee to facilitate your tres-chic ultra luxury Las Vegas getaway weekend? Sounds like blackjack to us.
