Friday, October 31, 2025

Fellow Mountain Cafe

Subject: Fellow Mountain Cafe
Location: Hunter, NY
Rating: 6+ [see key]

Having traveled much of New York state, I am always astounded how much more of it I still have not seen. One section I had yet to peruse was the area around Jewett. Next store to it is a quaint towns called Hunter and that town had what I had hoped; a really good coffee shop.

Pennie's Bake Shop and Espresso Bar


Subject: Pennie's Bake Shop and Espresso Bar
Location: Butler, PA
Rating: 6+ [see key]

Western Pennsylvania has a variety of hidden gems strewn about its small towns. While I don't often get the chance, when I'm in the area, I treasure the opportunity to mine them out.

UPDATE: Goodbye WIFI

TLDR: I am no longer going to notate whether a cafe has WIFI in my posts. 

In reflecting these past years, I realized that I tend to assume that WIFI exists in coffee spaces. Part of that comes down to the fact that the wireless internet feature has become a ubiquitous facet, one that I only really notice when a shop points out their specific policy or lacks internet entirely. Thus, what was once a new and exciting feature (like back in 2009), free WIFI has now become business as usual. 

This leads to my secondary reason to not bother noting the WIFI on this blog. Over the years, I have come to gradually support the hypothesis that cafe work culture seems to slowly poison a coffee shop, often contributing to its eventual demise. A coffeehouse can find strategies to stave off the atrophy of an all-day squatter subsisting off a $5 beverage, but even then, the WIFI seems to support the backbone of falsely-held customer entitlement to extended lodging in an establishment that really can't afford to support it. 

So in short, I am not remaining perched on a WIFI soapbox (shops can do what they want), but given the wide availability of wireless internet and that I no longer see it as a valuable feature to a shop, I shall henceforth wipe the question of "WIFI?" from my future posts.