Costa Coffee by Trinity

This is the coffee shop on the corner of Nassau Street and Dawson Street, over by Trinity College.  If you look at the Google maps location it shows a clothing store called Farrell & Brown used to occupy this spot.  Anyway it's another reason to like Dawson Street.  The interior of this Costa is a cut above the other locations in town as far as cool buildings go.  Plus, its big.  They have an entire room downstairs and a living room on the first floor, off the dining area.  It's like 3 coffee shops in 1.

We like going to Costa because... well I'll just say it:  I hate Starbucks.  Apparently I'm not the only one.  People hate Starbucks so much that Starbucks has started opening stealth stores without the Starbucks logo.  You read that right; Starbucks is opening shops that do not have the word "Starbucks" anywhere in sight.

Costa is a nice alternative.  They have decent caffè latte and they serve fantastic lemon poppy seed muffins.  Mmmm.  The interiors are generally comfortable and always decorated with the same stock-image artwork depicting cobblestone streets in Italy.  They're going for the authentic-Italian angle, as opposed to the Seattle full-of-themselves angle.  Generally speaking corporate coffee is corporate coffee, and comparing Starbucks to Costa is much of a muchness.  However, attitude is everything.  Costa seems to simply be about selling you a cup of coffee; they're not so much in your face like Starbucks is, pushing their retail crap on you.  With their CEO's biography, corporate-compiled Jazz CDs and branded-breath-mints stacked up on the counter, it gets to be a bit much.  Costa isn't selling that magic kool-aid.  They're just selling coffee.