Grumpy Steve's Coffee House

Grumpy Steve's Coffee House

Stillwater, MN

Reviewed September 12th, 2005

You'd be grumpy too if you played second fiddle to a cool cave, or maybe not. Grump Steve's seems to have harmoniously integrated itself on the edge of an ancient river cliff and the Joseph Wolf Cave that lies inside it. Back in the day, Joseph Wolf was not a wild canine who eat deer, moose or sheeps, but a German brewmeister extraordinaire who made fine alcoholic beer in the cool, constant 54 degrees of his cave for decades until prohibition came along and killed the dream, and some say the man (but lets get real, he was almost 90!). Alcoholic beer...whats the big deal here? Can't we all just get along?

For the fair price of five yankee dollars I took one of the hourly tours of the cave and learned about cave lore, baseball, water purification, air purification, Italian food, bier kraft (beer making - I don't know if thats German or not; it just rolled out of my brain that way so I wrote it down) fallout shelters, ice kraft (ice collecting), Disneyland, prohibition, boats rides and army rations. Pfew! Thats a lot of stuff. As far as caves go, there is not a lot to see. Without the guided portion of the tour, you could see all there is to see in ten or fifteen minutes. But you might not know all there is to know. Bear in mind that you are entering an underground space that has been shaped by human beings more than natural forces and seems more like a forgotten basement than a cave. And indeed the history of its use may be the most interesting thing about the Joseph Wolf Cave. That said, it also certainly has some great little nooks and crannies to view and quite a bit of decaying, historic junk to gawk at and wonder about and realize that people lived quite differently back in the days when men wore pink and cell phones were big and new, and even in the days before those days. Cave tours can be arranged at Grump Steve's or at a ticket office next door.

The tour itself is copywrited (and what an idiotic notion that is - like you can copywrite history, someone else's experiences, or my experience of history!) but all that means (according to the tour guide) is that you cannot publish pictures you take during the tour. Therefore I will make a point of saying that although Grumpy Steve's shares restrooms with the Joseph Wolf Cave, I took a picture of the restroom HOURS AFTER taking the tour and the pictures I took were connected with my visit to Grumpy Steve's not the Joseph Wolf Cave. In fact, I did not even bring my camera with me on the tour - so there! Ha. Ha. Ha.

As for the coffee house, it is your typical coffee house expect that it too has a few nooks and crannies. A "cave room" bears lots of burgundy carpeting and a spiral staircase like a 1960's hipster's bachelor pad. The main area and counter has most of the things one associates with coffee houses, with the exception of jewelry for sale by a (presumably) local artist and a bunch of these big and small scary, wickedly ugly home made troll things made out of sticks and stuff. To get to the restrooms, you will need to enter the cave. I'll spare you and curb the temptation to write the usual made up nonsense about initiation rites, hallucinogenic drugs, cave painting, sex parties and other flights of fancy I would normally be unable to resist liberally inserting in a review about cave bathrooms. My fancy is tired today, and feels too ill to fly. Apologies. Choose from the options above maybe, and insert your own nonsense. You have talents and abilities. You have power n' stuff. You have an imagination. Use it.

The bathrooms were obviously built around the cave, but somehow it still looked almost as though the cave crept into the bathrooms, neatly breaking away parts of the ceiling and rectangular sections of wall so it could go to the bathroom and sit on the throne like a civilized gent after millennia of restroomless darkness. Unfortunately, a porcelain toilet could never withstand the weight of a cave sitting on it and this cave is the source of a spring so it is peeing constantly so the toilet would overflow easily I'm afraid. So the cave is left to peek in, a perpetual visitor, enviously spying those who go about their business and wishing it wasn't a cave anymore so it could do these simple things like go to the bathroom or prepare a microwave dinner or fill up its car with gas and complain about the price. Such is the lot of a cave, perpetually manipulated by humans in the lonely, far reaching darkness of his moist, silence filled expanse.

- Justin Teerlinck

RESTROOM RATING: 6