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The Garage, SP Square Market

By Carl Fisher

September 21^st, 2015

Refueling

As is my habit, I usually search out places to grab a coffee at some point during the day. This happens particularly when I’m traveling (which doesn’t happen ofetn enough). It seems like my vacations revolve around finding a nice place for breakfast, then lunch, then a coffee, dinner, and then maybe a nice nibbly with something decaf afterwards. Galleries, museums, etc. are just the stuff with which you kill time before heading out again to find that hip, trendy, quirky place to eat or quaff. On weekends, which are vacations from the work week, it can follow a similar pattern, although on a much more modest scale. I don’t drink coffee often, but when I do, and I’m in San Jose, near downtown, I drink B2’s. B2 is the second location of Bellano coffee. I’ve never been to the original location because it’s not in my usual corridor of travel and I doubt that it has anywhere near the same people watching potential.

None of that crappy Starbucks stuff here.

Lappin it up

Once you’ve grabbed a steamy (or chilled) beverage, there’s lots of seating to work on your next literary masterpiece or figure out why you have so few Twitter followers (hint: not posting anything in months may have something to do with it). For some reason, there is usually a predominance of Macs. Maybe there’s a correlation between drinking coffee and using a PowerBook. Or maybe not.

Bloody good drinks

At the other end of this space is the Garage Bar. As you can tell from the pics, they make tasty beverages of a different sort. Ones that have a little more immediate kick to them than the caffeinated variety. I’m not a big lush, but seeing so many spicy options (for the B. Mary), I just had to try one. I have had more heavily garnished drinks of this sort, but with this one, there was a respectable amount, making it almost a meal in itself. And if I was still hungry, a narrow passage to left of the bar provides access to another cavernous space with food options o plenty (but more on that will have to wait for a future post).