Tranquil 1992 Coffee House,
and a Farewell to After Hours
There is a scale model of a city, trapped under a glass case. Inside, there is too much happening; nothing ever happens. As soon as something is built, it is ripped up again, to be replaced with a fleeting, ‘better’, new, again. Hands reach inside the case and impatiently squash an old building, press lettering onto a board outside a clean doorway which reads ‘just opened’, hands outside grasp the case and shake the city, and the roads are smashed, potholed by collapsing buildings, flying dogs, debris. Stop signs settle on the roads; . The seasons move quickly inside the glass - a bar opens its doors in Winter, and it has melted and disappeared by Summer. Let’s take a look inside, before the hands start to drum on the glass once more.
Inside, Winter – After Hours
At the start of the longest January on record, a plan was called off in a snowstorm. The owner-manager remained characteristically, extravagantly tranquil, his invitation reaching through the encircling snow-clouds, which began to smother the city, build a new pavement on white stilts up to knee height, petrifying the concrete beneath into a forgotten piece of history, entombed in a chamber. Buses and trains came to a muffled halt, snow silently piling past their rooves, as passengers gazed out at a smooth crush of bluish-white against windows. Clambering over this new terrain would require a new pace – you could not rush – the ice one layer below was buffed and slippery, solid and cold as marble. It was waiting for your ankle to slip, and fall onto it, like a chopping board for a cold fish. A red rectangle of light fell across the white pavement of Vyse Street, as Tranquil 1992 After Hours opened its doors for the first time. Originally the home of Tranquil 1992 Coffee House, the space re-emerged anew as ‘a cosy wine bar inspired by the brand’s signature Western–Asian fusion’. Charlotte and I could not attend this opening night – we were, after all, trapped under ice with the rest of the Concrete - but ventured out the following week.
After Hours was petite, set in the front room of a Victorian terrace, with a wooden bar cutting it in half. On one side, the owner-manager, Thang Nguyen, and partner served drinks from behind rows of packets of crisps, wine bottles lined up like keys on a piano. On the other side, the handful of small tables were full. Most of our table drank apple juice, dutifully dry for January - I had two Japanese plum wines. I sat on my tall chair, submerged in wine coloured light, watching old cartoons projected onto the wall. Perhaps because I hadn’t been out in so long – the music, jazz and soft house, swelled into the warm air – I was floating. The décor was not imposing, there were a few prints on the wall, everything painted over with that warm red light - it was magnetically cosy and intimate in there.
The drinks menu was short – five premium wines, a beer, a cider and a fancy apple juice. This was intentional – Thang was not trying to please everyone. He drew a line connecting After Hours and dearest Pan-Pan - Vlad helped them in fashioning the wooden bar which bisected the room, and both independent venues had found their people within a certain cross-section of creatives and students. We talked about belonging and becoming a Brummie as an outsider; becoming a Brummie meant defending Brum from anyone, whilst constantly complaining about it. Back in Vietnam, news about the state of Birmingham’s finances had reached the owner’s family, who worried. On wine number two, I couldn’t help but tumble down towards the tangent onto some research I’d been doing, where I first found out that behind the city council’s record-breaking cuts, behind their much-publicised equal-pay liability, the council had overspent by £81m on implementing Oracle - yes that Oracle. It is not easy for anyone to keep holding on to the high street with economic storms rattling through the neighbourhoods we live in. Thang explained that, as independent small businesses in the Jewellery Quarter, the Tranquils pay the same VAT and corporation tax as mega-uber-behemoths like Starbucks (boo, hiss) – with rents so high no wonder JQ was whirling with change and new-instagrammable-trend-cafés disappeared as quickly as they arrived.
Our small table of concrete hosted an internationally renowned magician, and while my partner was under-reacting to an impressive trick, snow softly hurled itself against the windowpane, halted mid-whirl, paused for a moment, then melted into the black press of the night beyond the glass. We had a good night and then it was gone.
The drinks menu was short – five premium wines, a beer, a cider and a fancy apple juice. This was intentional – Thang was not trying to please everyone. He drew a line connecting After Hours and dearest Pan-Pan - Vlad helped them in fashioning the wooden bar which bisected the room, and both independent venues had found their people within a certain cross-section of creatives and students. We talked about belonging and becoming a Brummie as an outsider; becoming a Brummie meant defending Brum from anyone, whilst constantly complaining about it. Back in Vietnam, news about the state of Birmingham’s finances had reached the owner’s family, who worried. On wine number two, I couldn’t help but tumble down towards the tangent onto some research I’d been doing, where I first found out that behind the city council’s record-breaking cuts, behind their much-publicised equal-pay liability, the council had overspent by £81m on implementing Oracle - yes that Oracle. It is not easy for anyone to keep holding on to the high street with economic storms rattling through the neighbourhoods we live in. Thang explained that, as independent small businesses in the Jewellery Quarter, the Tranquils pay the same VAT and corporation tax as mega-uber-behemoths like Starbucks (boo, hiss) – with rents so high no wonder JQ was whirling with change and new-instagrammable-trend-cafés disappeared as quickly as they arrived.
Our small table of concrete hosted an internationally renowned magician, and while my partner was under-reacting to an impressive trick, snow softly hurled itself against the windowpane, halted mid-whirl, paused for a moment, then melted into the black press of the night beyond the glass. We had a good night and then it was gone.
Inside, Summer – Tranquil 1992 Coffee House
It’s July. The older Tranquil sister, 1992 Coffee House, remains just around the corner from the now-departed After Hours. Highly rated (4.6 on Google), known for its small but chic interior, high-quality specialist Vietnamese coffee, egg coffee, cookies and the owner’s playful replies to the few negative reviews - if it’s too expensive, if it’s not for you, he will blow you a kiss, goodbye. Thang explains the price tag – the high-quality robusta beans, roasted in-house in butter and chocolate, used in their slower, phin filter dripped coffee drinks, and the higher cost for small cafes who don’t benefit from buying ingredients wholesale. I am not a stranger to paying double digits for two unremarkable lattes from one of the chains, proliferating on the post-2008-crash-late-capitalist-austerity-by-another-name-highstreet, but I still wonder how I will feel about parting with £7.80 to sample a specialist coffee on my teaching wage.
On my first visit, they are sold out of their famous cookies. The décor is simple; white globular paper light shades, a few framed prints, Graceland lyrics taped to a board on clean white walls. The coffee arrives; golden, juicy condensation ripening and rolling down the sides of the cup. Creamy yellow flecked with tiny specs of dark brown cinnamon - from above, my egg coffee is an egg custard. I mix the concoction as I am directed; advocaat rises into my nostrils – a sip of crème brûlée, perfectly sweet, crème brûlée with a coffee on its mind. The café is half full of students in small groups, someone on a laptop – the young women outside have never had a cookie – they always seem to sell out too quickly, but the matcha is worth the price, they say, and they don’t feel rushed out if they want to sit in and study. I squint in the bleachy sunlight to look for the bus stop. I transport our coffee carefully on the way to the Concrete office, the pavement sizzling beneath my sandals, the ice rapidly disappearing into the rest. Jacob’s coffee is covered with a thick layer of salted foam – forming into craters under the pressure of the summer air; he remarks it is ‘so pudding I forget it’s making my heart race’. On my journey, I step across tram lines that were not here in the Winter. It is a new land, this hot dead Summer. Everything feels dust – the parks are brown and when did I last see a bug?
Perhaps nothing better illustrates the churning newness of Brum; the bar I was supposed to be writing this review about has closed down in the time it’s taken me to sit down and write it. A familiar sense – hardly an original feeling or comment – that there is so much constant newness, information accessible, that I find it almost impossible to grasp something for long enough to get a good look at it, let alone to feel it, or start to understand it, before it disappears into this oncoming rush - but it feels like only I can make this right. A review would be something to give. A panic-treat instinct kicks in – I must taste a cookie before everything changes again. I return again, in the hopes of trying one – on a Wednesday morning, the small café is still mostly full. This time I sample the salted iced coffee – white bread, toasted to a slight gold, salted butter, melted, with a stroke of honey on top. Still no cookies. What is it about coffee shops which makes them indestructible, really ubiquitous, in a time of rapid change, economic/ecologic degradation? Partly the rise of service industry jobs, post-(still)-austerity inequality, bringing together lonely but often wealthier WFH workers with re-trained or young servers in need of work, a lack of true 3rd spaces, but surely something primal too. In this overwhelming swirl of change, a taste, a seat in which to stop, a little treat, a rush of sugar, to pin you to the moment, force your presence, in a way not much else can promise to do.
I return once more and finally get the treat just out of reach – one banana pudding, one red velvet cookie. The first – golden, perfect, soft crumbs melting over a banana cooked on a barbeque until it turns into shining toffee- it’s gone. Then, a brick of chocolate settles onto my red velveteen tongue. I am choking on chocolate, I have to take a breather, sip a mouthful of that coffee - I never have tasted better.
When that taste comes, a custardy yellow flows through me and pulls me by a thread into the air, towards the buttery sun, beyond the glass case, beyond the hands shaking it, but on and on to everyone else on the planet who is sipping a coffee – wherever and whoever they are, thinking, oh isn’t this lovely, if only for a moment.