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Your A-List: Best Coffeeshop
We had a great Austin360 cover story on coffee shops with corollary vices a couple weeks back. In it, food critic Mike Sutter profiled this week’s winner Ruta Maya (20 percent of the vote), one of the first coffee shops I visited upon returning to Austin in 2002.
Here is what he wrote:
If there were a Museum of Austin Clich´s and Stereotypes, Ruta Maya would be its gift shop and snack bar. On the patio, there are petitions to sign and a table promising ‘Cabalistic Tarot Readings.’ And the deep, roasty aroma of coffee fills the senses, tingles the scalp - a caffeine contact high, with liquid satisfaction starting as low as $1.50 for an espresso. There’s beer on tap and six wines by the bottle or glass, plus sandwiches, wraps, empanadas and whatever else lands in the takeout cases.
On stage, an open-mike poet in black leather pants drops flinching F-bombs in adjectival and astonishingly active verb forms. But even before Ruta Maya left its dodgy Warehouse District birthplace on Fourth Street for its rambling warren on South Congress Avenue some years ago, cigars have given the place an earthen Latin American character. The Habana House tobacco shop’s door opens right into Ruta Maya, an F-bomb shelter with a walk-in humidor the size of a two-car garage and half a dozen chairs, all occupied on an April night by cigar-smoking men staring blankly at ‘American Idol.’ For cigar people, the shop carries dozens of boutique and classic brands, including 26 Arturo Fuente frontmarks, at reasonable markups. For tourists, the Acid cigars smell like tobacco and patchouli oil, an authentic sensory memento of Ruta Maya.
Ruta Maya [site]
3601 S. Congress Ave., Suite D-200 [map]
707-9637
Go to the jump for complete results.
Others receiving votes
- Mozart’s, 13 percent
- Jo’s, 11 percent
- Austin Java, 8 percent
- Spider House, 5 percent
- Caffe Medici, 5 percent
- Thunderbird Coffee, 4 percent
- Flipnotics, 4 percent
- Cafe Mundi, 2 percent
- Kick Butt Coffee, 2 percent
- Progress, 2 percent
- Epoch, 2 percent
- Halcyon, 2 percent
- Flightpath, 2 percent
- Dominican Joe, 2 percent
- Bouldin Creek, 2 percent
- JP’s Java, 2 percent
- Little City, 2 percent
- Trianon, 2 percent
- Irie Bean Coffee Bar, 1 percent
- La Dolce Vita, 1 percent
- Quack’s, 1 percent
- Green Muse, < 1 percent
- Clementine, < 1 percent
- Wake the Dead, < 1 percent
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