007: Bolt Coffee

Location: 61 Washington Street Hours: Monday to Thursday: 7:30am to 4pm Friday: 7:30am to 9pm, Saturday: 8am to 9pm, Sunday: 8am to 3pm Date of Visit: January 24, 2025

This is Bolt Coffee.

You think you will always have an affinity for Bolt. It sits in one of the commercial spots in the Biltmore parking garage, kitty-corner from City Hall. You remember that this was the first home of Ellie's, which was next to some more upscale version of urban outfitters that soon folded. Bolt occupies both units.

For your first full-time job after college, you used to ride what is now RIPTA Line #1 from the East Side to Kennedy Plaza. Back then, though, it was Line #42, and they ran a special C42 line Mondays through Fridays, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, that, when you were a teenager, would take you all the way to Classical High School. You used to be vaguely amused when an adult would get on, take a look at the enormity of the teenage on the display among the other passengers, glance at the bus driver, who would generally give them a sort of resigned gesture indicating that they were sorry to say this was a school bus masquerading as public transit. And then they'd have to decide whether to get on and take their chances or step back out of the bus and risk being late to work. Most of them chose to step back out. When you started taking the 42 to work, you learned to wave the C42 on rather than get on. After getting off the normal bus at Kennedy Plaza, you'd walk up Fountain Street to the office on Broadway. Sometimes you're surprised you did that for two years without being pancaked. After you cross over I-95, there's a point where a three-lane service road intersects with where Broadway swells from two lanes to four and there's no light controlled left, so people charge it as fast as they can, which during the winter, when it's dark at 5pm, feels like taking your life into your own hands trying to cross as a pedestrian, regardless of what the little white glowing walking man says about who has the right of way.

You'd stop in at the Starbucks under the Biltmore Hotel. By the early 2010s, Starbucks had opened so many locations it was beginning to cannibalize its own business, which wasn't so much of a concern for Providence, which falls squarely into the geographic region of the country where Dunkin' Donuts has so many locations it cannibalizes its own business. But your coworker on the fundraising team took you one afternoon to the small specialty coffee shop in the newly opened Dean Hotel: Bolt Coffee.

The familiar has a strangeness to it now: the Dean is now the Neptune; the Starbucks has long since given up the ghost, the sketchy place next door, which had "Asian spa" in the glass double doors but all you could see was a nondescript white room, not much bigger than a closet, with a wooden door with a sliding peephole in it, is now an Ethiopian restaurant with great big glass windows where you can see everything going on. Not coincidentally, perhaps, the Neptune itself occupies what used to be "the Sportsman Gentlemen's Club," which was neither a club nor a place you'd find a lot of gentlemen but folded shortly after the state passed a law to make sex work illegal again when it was happening indoors, after a discovered loophole in the law briefly decriminalized it after 2003. The rooms are tiny, no doubt reflecting their past utility, and one of them ended up being your sister and her husband's when they flew in from Los Angeles to get married at the Dorrance.

And the little Bolt counter in the then-Dean, which started so small, with just an owner working as the barista, is gone. After your coworker and you went there, you stopped in daily for your morning coffee, and at 2:00PM you'd take a break to walk back across I-95 to get an afternoon pick-me-up. Once you came in to a very quiet shop with only the owner, Bryan, standing behind the counter, practicing latte art. You ordered one and received a teddy bear in your foam.

Not so long after you'd first started going there, you encountered a line so long it literally went out the door (which, in all fairness, was not difficult to do in a shop that small). Alton Brown did a show at PPAC one time and posted videos of exploring Providence. He stopped into Bolt, where the barista, Justin, who would eventually go on to be Bolt's roaster when they started roasting their own beams and now owns his own roastery in turn, was working. Brown ordered a cortado, which he reported to be the best cortado he'd ever had. The next time you were in and saw Justin, you ordered "Alton Brown's best cortado." You suppose it's the best cortado you've ever had as well. But it was also your first cortado, and you remember being vaguely disappointed with it. You might not be a cortado guy.

What you definitely are is an espresso tonic guy, which you also first encountered at Bolt, although you've since read it was invented in Sweden. But there's a special magic to it, where the quinine in the tonic disposes of the bitterness in the espresso, leaving behind the fruit notes which remind you that coffee is, when it's alive and growing, a cherry-bearing shrub. An excellent drink in the summer. Your friend Quince works for a cruise line in the summer, and he can take a guest for free and in 2023 he insisted on taking you for a trip from Athens to Venice, during what turned out to be called "Heatwave Lucifer." He noted he'd never heard the staff refuse a passenger's request, so you decided to just ask the bartender one morning to pour you a shot of espresso over a glass of tonic water, then repeated it every day of the cruise. One day, you were waiting in line behind a passenger who, to your surprise, ordered the same thing. You were next up and said you'd like the same. The passenger looked at you and went "you're the guy who came up with it!" You demurred, saying you'd learned it from Bolt. He'd apparently been behind you one morning, heard your order, and decided it sounded refreshing.

His wife reported that he was thrilled with it, in a tone that suggested she'd heard enough about it already. The bartender that day put the espresso in first, rather than floating it on top, and the other passenger demanded it be remade, because he liked the effect of the espresso suspended on the tonic. You offered to drink both the mistakes, which were indistinguishable in taste from espresso on top.

You and Ophelia came here to the Washington Street location when it first opened. Justin told you they'd put almost everything they had into it. It was March of 2020, and you remember looking out of the plate glass windows across the street where a younger East Asian couple got out of their car. They both put masks on immediately. You thought to yourself, "that seems excessive." You had their breakfast sandwich for the first time. It's just eggs and cheese, mostly, but it has a tomato jam and it's served on brioche. The jam is something of a novelty, but there is something satisfying about an actual tomato it loses.

Weeks earlier you'd been to a cupping at Bolt's roastery which Justin had led. Everyone had been given one cupping spoon each. A woman made a joke about everyone getting sick from the new virus. She and her partner were there with a set of parents, you presume hers. Cuppings are apparently how they train judges for coffee. Justin tells you that getting rated as a judge requires you to taste the same coffees with a group of three other judges who have already been certified. You score the coffee according to some criteria you're sure Justin told you but which you've long since forgotten. Your scores can't deviate from the judges' by more than a fraction of a point.

The amusing part of it, of course, is that taste is subject, and so are flavor notes. Before Bolt roasted its own, it sold other coffees, and you once picked up a bag that reported to taste like cherry, chocolate, and television. You can't say you tasted the television, but then again your palate wasn't as refined back then, so who can say for certain?

A week after your first visit to Bolt's Washington Street location, and everything was closed.

You worried about them after. You suggested to everyone you knew, even people on the various internet communities you frequent, that they subscribe to get their regular bags of coffee. For several years after, you'd occasionally have someone in Colorado or California tell you that they still get the coffee. They still like the coffee. You still get the coffee. You still like the coffee. For many years you got two bags a month, and you used those two bags up every month, sometimes having to stop into Bolt to get another bag when you ran out early.

Now, you get coffee at the office through a Nespresso machine you use to make Americanos, which isn't better coffee, but it is often more convenient to simply go to work rather than wake up slightly earlier and grind the beans and make yourself pour over with a Hario V60, and you have six bags backed up.

Since you started getting coffee through work and turned the home bar into a coffee shrine you've changed your monthly whole bean order into one for decaf, because you drink much more of that now in the evenings, when you might have previously had a beer or whiskey. You keep it split out into a rack of plastic tube in the freezer, so that the beans are fresh. 20 grams of beans in each, so that you only use enough for the cup you're making. You're waiting on a ridiculously over-engineered espresso machine you backed in a crowdfunding campaign two years ago that has been held up for a year in testing and now the final products are being held up again by tariffs, but they've at least shipped a few hundred. There are bottles of unopened tonic water you bought when it seemed like it was just a month away from delivery sitting under the bar, next to the gallon jugs of distilled water you treat with a mineral packet so that the taste of your coffee is just so. Except for the missing complex home espresso machine, the transformation from insufferable cocktail guy to insufferable coffee guy is almost complete.

You don't go to Bolt as often anymore, you feel too conspicuous an anonymous customer, like Rip Van Winkle coming down from the mountain and the dogs barking at him, in a way you used to not when it was a single counter in the Dean and you knew every barista's name. You've stopped in late, after 4pm, because the Washington Street location stays open late, in defiance of the unwritten laws of Providence that all cafes must close before it gets dark out, but only on Fridays and Saturdays. You're getting your hair cut at Urban Fellow next door, but you're forty minutes early. You've been paying the extra to have your facial hair trimmed, too, in part because you barely take care of yours and in part because you can't grow a proper, thick beard, and your barber cuts it in a way that gives to illusion of being simply a well-manicured hedge. Having your facial hair cut involves a hot washcloth being placed over your face for a moment, and she uses a straight razor and then finishes by brusquely rubbing some oil into your beard (or some other product--you've never quite discerned what it is). There's something peculiar about have foreign hands roughly rub at your facial hair. You've been mentally referring to it as a "cutthroat spa."

You're generally okay to tolerate caffeine late, but you ask if they can do a decaf drip coffee. They cannot. They can pull a shot of decaf espresso and make it into an Americano. You smile and agree to it. The Americano is mythically believed to be a derisive name for the way American GIs in Italy after WW2 would order their espresso watered down to resemble the standard eight ounce American coffee, but more likely originated in the 1950s in Central America, where it was a derisive name for weak coffee. Either way, it's a derisive name for coffee with the grounds-to-water ratio off, the joke at Americans' expense. But it's stuck, and so has the drink's simple popularity. An eight ounce cup of coffee with some of espresso's complexity.

In the idle of the wait for your appointment, you wonder if a decaf Americano, being the weakest of Americanos, is the apex of the form.

You wonder, too, if the original patrons of Starbucks felt a bit like this when it started to explode, that point at which it had six locations and bought out Peet's Coffee, that it was slipping away from them. You don't know if Bolt will become the next Starbucks, but you'd like to believe it would, that it would raise the game a little, that at least the coffee will be a little better. You'll sit there, twenty years from now, less hair to cut but more to shave, with a decaf Americano, drinking in an over-corporatized vibe, in a business that has thrived while you grieve the struggle it took to get there and remember when Bryan practiced a teddy bear in your milk foam.

This is Bolt.