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Your report on the Eye Opener Coffee Shop (Young & Hungry, 2/7) sadly failed to convey that establishment’s rich color.
In his mid-20s, Eye Opener owner Bryant Adams, who drives a ’63 Beetle and has a dog named Hendrix (and who your reporter identifies as “a guy in dreadlocks”), missed his decade, but he has recreated a piece of it in Mount Rainier. The Eye Opener would have seemed perfectly in place on Telegraph Avenue in the early 1970s, when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley. The many bright colors, sunlit by a huge,
ast-facing window, and the decor also remind me of all the colorful VW microbuses that lined Golden Gate Park on the occasion of Jerry Garcia’s death.
The location in Mount Rainier adds to the ambience. Mount Rainier feels the way Takoma Park probably felt in the days of Tony the Tiger and Mr. Clean. It also has some of the character of Perry Lane, the Menlo Park street that got its 15 or 20 minutes from Ken Kesey’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Kitty-corner from the Eye Opener is a Mount Rainier institution, the Glut, a bustling neighborhood grocery cooperative to which refugees from Bread and Circus prices might flock, if only they knew it existed.
Brookland
via the Internet