Imagine, if you will: seated in your cushy red leather chair, you peer up from your laptop for a moment to concentrate on the poet onstage.
Liking what you hear, you take a sip of the house special and gaze back towards the bar, where the logo of a famous rapper's record label engulfs the wall and you wonder how they mixed the two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen just so.
Welcome to the Water Cafe.
And where is this luxe locale? SoHo? South Beach? Santa Monica?
Nope.
In a strip mall. In Lexington Park, Maryland. An hour southeast of Washington.
The Good Water Store and Cafe, which opened in November last year, is billed as the first of its kind in Maryland. You get your drinks here clean, cleaner and cleanest. Three grades of purity.
And there's another surprise: The "Good” in the café's name is an acronym for Getting Out Our Dreams, which, not coincidentally, is shared by the music label founded by platinum-selling rapper Kanye West.
For good reason: West's father, Ray, owns the cafe.
The rapper lent money for the creation of the café to his father and, his father notes, he may make the occasional visit.
Refreshing concept
The cafe has all the trappings of the modern coffeehouse — WiFi, flat-screen TVs, performance space, a relaxed neighbourhood vibe — in a town whose main road is littered with fast-food joints and big-box stores.
"This is something we don't have — a place for people to come hang out, talk or use the net," customer Gloria Eisner said.
"You can go to a bar or you can drive to Washington and that takes two hours."
If you're not quite sure what a water cafe is, you're not alone. "This has never been done before, so there was bound to be some confusion," Ray West said.
"We went to the county health department and they said, 'What the heck is a water store?'"
The cafe serves more than water: It has a wide selection of teas, bubble tea, wraps, salads, yoghurt, smoothies and coffee, all made with premium distilled water. West hopes visitors will also rely on his store for regular drinking and cooking water.
In the back, customers can purchase plastic drums and pump water from his taps.
West says his aim is to spur awareness of global clean-water issues.
"There's just so much in our water that there's no natural way of getting it out because these are man-made chemicals," West said.
"We've reached the point where people have to take personal responsibility for what they drink and that's what we're trying to teach people here."
Ray who served as a clinical director at a mental health clinic, discovered that access to clean water was the second highest cause of global anxiety after oil.
"It just clicked to me, the way global warming is now starting to resonate with many people," West said.
Ray West found the rents in Washington prohibitive. Gwen Bankins, a distribution system operator with Southern Maryland Electric Cooperative, appealed to him to keep his business in St Mary's because the cafe could offer an opportunity for local artists.
The economy of Lexington Park has long centred on the Patuxent River Naval Air Station. As the base has grown considerably in the past 15 years, it has spurred commercial and residential growth, generating an influx of well-educated professionals.
Median household income has jumped from $54,706 (Dh200,924) in 2000 to $62,939 (Dh231,162) in 2005, keeping the county more than $1,000 (Dh3,672.80) above the state average.
West saw an untapped market. "Lexington Park is going to be a very nice place and we are hoping to catch the front end of that wave,” he said.
Best-selling beverage
Although bottled water isn't the rarefied refreshment it once was — the Beverage Marketing Corporation predicts that single-serve bottled water will overtake soda as the best-selling beverage by 2012 — West said that in the US, water access and purity issues are often an afterthought.
At a news conference marking the café's opening, West pointed out that many residents in Southern Maryland get their drinking water from wells, which don't receive regular state testing.
Steve King, director of the county water and sewer service, said that the system exceeds last year's federal guidelines for acceptable levels of organic arsenic but that the utility is replacing the offending source with a deeper, clean aquifer.
Otherwise, he said, the water is clean and distillation is an expensive and "absolutely unnecessary" alternative.
