Bibo forever

Welcome to this week’s Reno News & Review.

I was really heartbroken to learn about the demise of Bibo Coffee Company’s Record Street location. Stupid “progress” of university expansion. The company has several other locations still going strong, but there was something really special about the Record Street spot. It had a genuine community vibe that many coffee shops aspire to or at least try to fake.

But Record Street had it for real. It was close enough to the university that you’d often bump into professors grading papers or students cramming for exams, but because they had rotating art exhibitions—booked, in recent years, by the folks at the Holland Project—and even the occasional live music event, there was also a real local-arts-scene presence. Plus an ever-changing, always-colorful cast of entertaining, occasionally surly baristas.

Back when the RN&R office was on Center Street—you might remember, on the corner of Seventh Street, overlooking the freeway entrance—we were only a few blocks away, so that was my go-to choice to schedule interviews. I had hundreds of meetings there over the years, and we’ve run innumerable photos taken in front of that building or along the train tracks across the parking lot.

Now, it joins the pantheon of great vanished Reno hangouts—like Deux Gros Nez, Reno’s original hip coffeeshop, whose closing party was one of the best shindigs ever, or the old-school Zephyr Bar, back before it turned into an airport bar, or the Satellite Cocktail Lounge, currently revived as the Loving Cup, or Del Mar Station, site of maybe the single best set of music I’ve ever seen in Reno, when The Ex played before Fugazi way back in 1999.

Anyway. Congrats to Bibo owners Paul and Deb Martin—sweet and hard-working people who deserve your business—on a terrific run at that spot, and glad to see they’re still going strong at their other locations. Long live Bibo!