by Carol » Mon May 23, 2011 10:56 am
WOW Café Midi that was an exciting place! I was a newly graduated high school student if I remember correctly and back then Fresno was still considered to be a country town. When the Café opened they had racks on the walls with magazines, books and newspapers from all around the world. I was so impressed! It was so different for our “one Pony town”, like a little piece of Height Ashbury there in the Tower. There were a lot of caricatures in there reading and drinking their exotic coffees, or so we thought back then. There was a professor looking person in slacks, cross-legged reading a foreign magazine, a rebellious looking college student that looked like he was ready to demonstrate against Viet Nam.
That new look of a glassy eyed drop out hung-over from the last hallucinate he’d taken, an old hermit, serious college students, some business people from the surrounding area and just looky-lus like me taking it all in with my post adolescent mind imagining stories about each character I stared at. I remember eating an unusual sandwich with sprouts on it and a coke as I had not yet developed a taste for coffee. This place gave me a feeling that I was part of something, a movement, a piece of a big city like San Francisco. It turned out to be like a cult of regulars that just kept going back and hanging out. Even the outside of the café was unusual for Fresno with its acid-rock handbills and underground student meeting flyers taped on the windows.
The one that opened in the Figs was never the same – I went once, terribly disappointed - and I am sure they did not want the same unsavory people out there. The new café was more of a “Who’s who” kind of place that had nothing to do with the original Café Midi. It was too far for the college students and way too expensive - and too hi profile for some of the others. In the back of my mind through the years I never forgot that place and always thought “I would like to open a place like Café Midi”
WOW Café Midi that was an exciting place! I was a newly graduated high school student if I remember correctly and back then Fresno was still considered to be a country town. When the Café opened they had racks on the walls with magazines, books and newspapers from all around the world. I was so impressed! It was so different for our “one Pony town”, like a little piece of Height Ashbury there in the Tower. There were a lot of caricatures in there reading and drinking their exotic coffees, or so we thought back then. There was a professor looking person in slacks, cross-legged reading a foreign magazine, a rebellious looking college student that looked like he was ready to demonstrate against Viet Nam.
That new look of a glassy eyed drop out hung-over from the last hallucinate he’d taken, an old hermit, serious college students, some business people from the surrounding area and just looky-lus like me taking it all in with my post adolescent mind imagining stories about each character I stared at. I remember eating an unusual sandwich with sprouts on it and a coke as I had not yet developed a taste for coffee. This place gave me a feeling that I was part of something, a movement, a piece of a big city like San Francisco. It turned out to be like a cult of regulars that just kept going back and hanging out. Even the outside of the café was unusual for Fresno with its acid-rock handbills and underground student meeting flyers taped on the windows.
The one that opened in the Figs was never the same – I went once, terribly disappointed - and I am sure they did not want the same unsavory people out there. The new café was more of a “Who’s who” kind of place that had nothing to do with the original Café Midi. It was too far for the college students and way too expensive - and too hi profile for some of the others. In the back of my mind through the years I never forgot that place and always thought “I would like to open a place like Café Midi”