I’ve been saying forever that Baton Rouge can be a cool hip city full of third wave coffee shops and vintage stores. Anyone who has been down government street knows that we are well on our way to becoming a yuppie paradise that every beanie wearing, The 1975 listening cool guy can be proud of. That’s why I frequent the coolest spot on government street, French Truck Coffee.

If you know me, you know I love a place that’s full of cool light bulbs that let you know there was a lot of thought put into what people will see when they look up from the poetry they were writing on their macbook. The light bulbs are perfectly matched with the dumb scientific equipment randomly placed throughout the building to make you really feel that the coffee you are spending eight dollars on might actually be worth eight dollars. I mean, how could it not be if there’s an Erlenmeyer flask in my peripheral vision? The large metal contraption that you can see through the glass walls on the bar really gives the impression that a lot of work went into making my twelve dollar cold brew coffee, even if I’ve never seen it being used and am not sure if it actually works. I also love a coffee joint that has a bar. I mean it’s 2018 y’all, I want caffeine to be treated like a drug, and the bar does just that. It really gives me this romantic vision of myself as a drug addicted freelance blogger, even if the only drug I’ve ever done is coffee.

I think its just really cool that a New Orleans company would come up to Baton Rouge and really show us how to make a neighborhood POP! There has been an influx of companies like French truck opening shops up in previously low-income neighborhoods and making them cool again. This is a great idea, and everyone in New Orleans has been really open to it and not hostile at all. The ownership really knows what its doing here in Baton Rouge. By coming in and taking a spot that could’ve been used by a Baton Rouge native to open up a business, they are showing us how to develop a culture of coolness and artesian craft that has nothing to do with receiving Baton Rouge tax breaks and exploiting a new labor market. They are great employers who would never treat their employees wrong by giving them a false sense of security or using one shitty apartment window unit to cool the staff during the height of summer. Things like that would never happen and I’m super confident in the well being of all the workers there. The quality of the ingredients is absolutely overwhelming. It doesn’t just taste like coffee from McDonalds dressed up. It taste like a dance in your mouth, the dance of paying more for aesthetics.

There are few things I love more in this world than paying fifteen dollars for a cup of coffee and being surrounded by guys with beards and bandannas wrapped around their neck. The amount of cool people and easy listening indie tunes that inhabit French Truck Coffee make it the cove of flannel culture and liberal feel good capitalism that we so need in Baton Rouge. There’s so much negativity in this world, that sometimes it’s nice to just sit back with a thirty dollar cup of coffee and listen to all the bland like minded opinions at French Truck and forget about the world. It really makes it easier to never have to face the negative impact I have on the world by shoving overpriced coffee in my face and taking instagram pictures in front of their yellow wall.