A warm glow suffuses the café. Late afternoon sunlight streams through the windows, filtering through steam that rises from a dozen tiny cups of espresso and bouncing off rough, bright-yellow walls. One whole wall is crammed with gold-framed pictures of Italian villas, street scenes and ancient churches. A deep, wide couch faces these pictures, and a bookcase, reaching all the way to the ceiling, is packed with volumes large and small, new and old, signaling the obvious success of the café’s take-one, leave-one policy. At a nearby table, with newspapers scattered underneath plates and glasses, a couple splits a Panini Genovese. Behind the counter, a barista foams by hand milk for lattes.
“I want to have a different place,” says Claudio Ragazzi, owner of Cafféspresso, in Henrico’s Gaskins Road shopping center, just off Patterson Avenue. “I want a different place, even if I have to lose business.” For the time being, there’s no danger of that. Elsewhere, the economy may be slowing down and the gourmet coffee business slumping, but on this Monday afternoon, his café is full of customers and conversations.
Maybe it’s what’s different about Cafféspresso that makes all the difference. Try as they may, chain restaurants can’t fake this old-world ambience. Ragazzi knows what he knows for good reason. He was born and raised in Ferrara on the Po River in northeastern Italy. A walled city, Ferrara boasts a world-class university (Copernicus slept here) and 14th-century palazzos. This is not a town that time forgot: When Claudio was still in diapers, Vittorio De Sica and his crew took over the narrow streets and palatial villas to film the classic movie “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis.”
Nor is this a culture that has forgotten what it can offer the rest of the world, including Henrico: great coffee and good food, made the old-fashioned way. When Claudio served in the Italian army, he was taught the barista’s trade, serving espresso in the mornings and, at night, espresso with grappa.
Other aspects of his art he learned from his grandmother. He makes the focaccia for his panini sandwiches, for example, the way she made it back home. And he imports his coffee beans from a small town near Milan, “so it is very, very like what you get in Italy,” he says.
Compare the atmosphere, not to mention flavor, of a neighborhood coffeehouse like Claudio’s with what you get elsewhere, and it isn’t difficult to understand why many restaurant chains straining to offer an “experience” as well as food and drink are falling on very hard times indeed. Starbucks, the world’s largest such enterprise, seems to have believed it could replicate a supposedly inimitably soulful moment in time infinitely many times across the globe, sort of like Mickey D’s, only upscale.
By the time Starbucks had opened so many shops you couldn’t escape them, McDonald’s itself was serving up a decent cup of coffee. By then, Starbucks, by its own chairman and CEO’s admission, had succeeded mainly in “watering down the Starbucks experience” and was closing stores by the hundreds.
If there are lessons here, one may be that authenticity, however sincerely you desire it, just cannot be faked. People who seek a genuine experience—who will never be satisfied with pale imitation—will be able to find it, though they will be more likely to do so at places like Claudio’s that are content to get things right on a small scale, whatever it takes, rather than seek to conquer the world in a hurry.
“Most coffee is roasted too fast,” he explains. “The longer you roast it, the less acid it is. Then it can be smooth, not bitter.” That’s why he takes such pains. He has his imported beans roasted slowly by a coffee-and-tea specialist in Williamsburg, for example. The beans are then delivered exclusively to Cafféspresso, which is the only place in the world you can get this blend, this roast.
But coffee isn’t the only house specialty. Claudio is also the only area merchant to serve Italian chocolate, which is much richer than American hot chocolate—so thick, in fact, that you’ve got to eat it with a spoon. And this summer, he is serving for the first time a traditional Italian dessert: gelato with fruit, drizzled with caramel and chocolate, topped with whipped cream. Delizioso.
Claudio is deep voiced and masculine, his speech still laced with an Italian accent. Although he now speaks English fluently, he had never been to the United States until he was in graduate school, and his arrival here was something of an accident. When he was in Costa Rica, conducting research toward his master’s degree in geology, he met his future wife, a pediatrician. She was an American, in that Central American country to do charitable medical work. They didn’t have a language in common, but no matter: When her assignment ended, Claudio followed her back to Los Angeles. They married in 1996 and two years later moved to Richmond.
Before starting his coffee business, Claudio taught learning-disabled children at Northstar Academy, and later, Italian language and geography classes at Virginia Commonwealth University. He still teaches one class, on the geography of the Mediterranean, each semester.
Claudio chose to open his business in Henrico because he felt the market in the city of Richmond was too crowded and because of the lower cost of doing business in the county. He was able to find an affordable rent and refinished the store’s interior himself, using recycled materials. From his store, it’s a quick trip to DeLuca Gelato, the shop that supplies his gelato, and to Tom Leonard’s Farmer’s Market in Short Pump, which he says has the best mozzarella locally available.
The setting alone offers tantalizing possibilities for future improvements. Trees bloom just out the café’s back windows, and the patio out front will allow Claudio to stage concerts when the weather is warm.
In all this, his aim is to make his business “a destination where people come to hang out, enjoy, talk about travel.” After hours, he offers Spanish and Italian language classes, and he plans to organize and guide a group trip to Italy soon. And someday, maybe, he’d like to open a second shop. But he entertains no fantasies of going global. He has no plans to open another Cafféspresso.
“It would have to be very different from this place,” he says.
