Before the Coffee Gets Cold Reviewed by Ruth Paget
Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a novel about a dingy, Tokyo café with a chair that can transport you back in time, giving the book its fantasy element that sells a lot of coffee.
Beverages, alcoholic or non-alcoholic, are moneymakers for restaurants, so readers involved in the restaurant industry might enjoy how this dinky café uses the chair time machine to ring up lots of coffee, curry rice, and yakitori chicken orders.
The café regulars are a man staving off Alzheimer’s Disease by reading travel literature, the ghost who sits in the chair time machine and who only gets up once a day to use the bathroom, and the waitress who always has curlers in her hair. The waitress is slow yet friendly and makes even first-time customers feel like family. The waitress lets people confide in her or lets them write or work on creative projects “to keep ‘em coming back” as we say in the Western United States. That phrase is the mantra of all successful restaurants.
This Tokyo café has interested more than 3 million readers worldwide. Other reviewers call the book cute, chatty, and fun. Reflect a bit, though. One of the novel’s characters plays massive, multiplayer, online, role-playing games (MMPORGs). This café might be a mini role-playing game run by the regulars to ensure meals, to stake out a place of repose, and to maintain steady employment.
The café owners seem to know what will attract enough customers to make a profit. The owners have identified a market niche and their niche’s needs, wants, and desires. Everyone, for example, drinks coffee – time travelers or not.
People interested in the following careers might consider this book more than a quick read:
-restaurant owners
-servers
-bartenders
-restaurant publicists
-writers
-interior decorators
-artists
-coffee salesman
Before the Coffee gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi is a book that deserves a second reading just to see why this café survives and thrives in a basement location.
By Ruth Paget, author Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France
