A failed Revolution

Napa cafe owners blame restrictions, complaints for downfall

By KEVIN COURTNEY
Register Staff Writer

Café Revolution, formerly The Smoking Cat, has closed, taking with it the dream of two young Napans.

Jackie and Michael Mendez, both 23, labored without pay for 15 months to make their Main Street cafe a comfortable spot where young people could gather to talk, sing and recite poetry.

The dream fell apart when the city, responding to neighborhood complaints, imposed restrictions on hours, entertainment and outdoor dining, the owners said.

In the cafe’s final months, Café Revolution ended up serving mostly a middle-aged clientele, not local youth in need of a place to go, Michael Mendez said.

“We couldn’t do anything we needed to make money,” said John Hammond, Jackie Mendez’s father, who estimated that he lost $300,000 in the venture.

The original business plan called for a coffee house with an outdoor hookah bar where customers could smoke tobacco in an age-old Middle Eastern way.

The hookah bar would have been a big revenue generator, Hammond said. Instead, hookahs generated controversy and restrictions that fatally wounded the cafe, he said.

Hammond is bitter about the city’s treatment of their business. “It appears that we have sold our youth out for tourists,” he said.

“In a normal city, when you open something cool, they let it fly,” Michael Mendez said. In Napa, “if it’s not a wine bar, don’t bother.”

Clashing cultures

Napa put the kibosh on the hookah patio, while also banning outdoor dining. Electronic music was prohibited, while acoustic entertainment on open mic nights had to end by 8 p.m. so as to not disturb a nearby family.

The Smoking Cat opened in October 2007 at Main and Napa streets, in the space formerly occupied by Gina’s Deli. The owners thought the site’s commercial zoning would allow a variety of services geared to students and young adults.

Complaints started immediately. The proposed dining/hookah patio sat beneath the bedroom windows of a residence and across the street from St. John the Baptist Catholic School.

School principal Nancy Jordan wrote a letter to the city complaining of “loitering, young people smoking, inappropriate displays of affection, foul language and police activity, all within earshot of our students.”

In May, the Napa Planning Commission imposed tight restrictions, with several commissioners saying the cafe owners had ignored city regulations and had run roughshod over the family living next-door.

In a meeting Tuesday with a reporter at now-shuttered Café Revolution, the owners said they had tried to accommodate neighbors and follow city rules, but city requirements kept changing.

“I think it’s all driven by fear,” said Linda McIntyre, a local attorney who became a partner last summer in a last-ditch effort to keep the cafe alive. “Fear of the unknown. Fear of losing control. Fear if we allow this, what else will come in?”

Hammond said city officials were unsympathetic to their goal to attract young adults who have few entertainment options in town.

The neighboring family should have known that outdoor activities were possible when they bought next to a commercial property, he said.

As for St. John’s concerns, Hammond said hookah and live music would have been confined to evening hours to avoid students.

Noise and neighbors

Marlene Demery, the city’s interim planning manager, said the city was not hostile to the concept for The Smoking Cat, but did have problems with the location.

With two residences bordering the rear patio, “it was not a great location,” Demery said. “Nobody would have been concerned if it had been closer to downtown.”

Before the Planning Commission nixed acoustic entertainment after 8 p.m., police had responded some two dozen times to noise complaints involving customers standing outside at night. In every instance, police said the volume was not excessive for a commercial establishment, but had disturbed a neighbor, Hammond said.

While the cafe has operated without police visits since, those encounters drove away customers, he said. Open mic nights don’t work when they stop at 8 p.m., he said.

In recent months, the cafe underwent a name change and added groceries to its offerings. It continued to show cartoons on Saturday mornings and vintage movies on Saturday evenings.

The cafe also began selling inexpensive boxed lunches to St. John’s students whose parents wanted healthy offerings, Jackie Mendez said.

These efforts were not enough. After running through $300,000, there was no money left for promotion, Hammond said. The cafe shut down for New Year’s Eve and did not reopen.

Jordan, the St. John’s principal, lamented Wednesday the passing of Café Revolution. “We’d really come to a good place,” she said. “It felt like they’d hit their stride. It felt like they knew what the neighborhood needed.”

Students and parents had come to use the cafe for meals and snacks, Jordan said. Objections faded when the owners dropped the hookah idea and outdoor smoking, becoming a regular deli-coffee house, she said.

Jackie Mendez said she will pursue a career as an interior designer. She is considering opening a bed-and-bath store, but not in Napa. Her husband intends to finish at Napa Valley College, where he is studying photojournalism, and go on to a four-year school.

Jackie and Michael should be proud of themselves, McIntyre said. They created a “Berkeleyish” coffee house, putting “their heart and soul into every cup of coffee and every sandwich.”

“It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way,” Jackie Mendez said. “That’s a year and a half of our lives that we lost.”

You’ve learned invaluable lessons about life, McIntyre said. “You guys have a lot under your belt that will carry you.”

Michael Mendez said he would savor memories of open mic nights when the cafe was crowded with young people having a hometown experience that no Starbucks could ever provide.

“It was nice to stand back and look at what we had created,” he said. “A lot of people thanked us every day for bringing something else” to Napa.

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