Andrew Whit loves a good craft coffee, no different than the Houstonians we’ve met during this Best Coffee in Houston search and series. But Andrew – informal here because we’ve been on a first-name basis going back a decade – looks for something very specific in a good cup of coffee.
“I was raised with my grandparents and the person who drank the most coffee in my life when I was a kid was my grandfather, and he would drink it black, and he would drink it hot in our garage in the summer. And I started drinking black coffee at a young age because that just was how people drank coffee in my life,” Andrew said. “And it was never fancy coffee. It was always whatever they got from the grocery, and this was long before craft coffee was a thing in Texas, you know, especially for old people or whatever.
“And I remember getting free coffee when we would stay in a hotel or we’d be at the tire shop or whatever, right? And you could pour as much powdered sugar into it as you wanted. And it really wasn’t about the coffee. It was about where you were. And I think that that has translated into my relationship with coffee as an adult. It’s really never about the coffee. It’s about who I’m with.”
At the moment, Andrew is with me and Mrs. Sendejas at Bohemeo’s, the east end café which tops his list of Houston’s best coffee spots. There is not a close second. He’s enjoying an iced oatmeal latte on a Sunday afternoon. To understand the depth of the connection Andrew shares with coffee and community, you have to understand what he does professionally and how Bohemeo’s played a pivotal role in this unique vocation.
He’s a longtime local musician, an artist and the creative director of the Orange Show’s popular, monthly experimental art showcase, The Happening. Moreover, he’s one of Houston’s true movers and shakers, a builder of networks and, by his own account, “a consultant, but I focus mostly on creative consultation that does dabble sometimes in business consult. Overall, I would say that I’m basically a creative strategist. You have a problem, there’s almost nothing that creative strategy cannot resolve that through.”
Andrew is affable and our chat about coffee – which won’t really be all that much about coffee – stretches over a lengthy phone interview, some text messages and a meeting at Bohemeo’s. By the end of it all, a lot will be left on the cutting room floor, but he’ll also name OSO Coffee Co. and Campesino Coffee as additional favorites. Andrew has literally and figuratively brewed up a lot at Bohemeo’s, both as a one-time employee and as someone who began his consulting career by connecting small businesses and non-profits to skilled friends and acquaintances who happened to convene at “Bo’s,” as he calls it.
“When I went into business for myself, and as I was picking up clients, my whole ion was, oh, I want to work with non-profits and small businesses that are looking to become a more integral part of the Houston cultural landscape. If you feel like you are ready for that leap, I am a person you can talk to. I can integrate you through my networks and through my skills and my skills are not just my own because it’s like, well, I know a web developer. You need photographers? You need drone footage? You need videographers? Great. I know who to call to get these jobs done, and then I kind of facilitate from my artistic network into my professional network to fulfill the needs of my clients. And basically, I kind of work as like a one-man agency for them.”
Those clients have included The Orange Show, Blackwood Educational Land Institute, CIA Records, Nameless Sound, the Heights’ creative wellness studio Creo and more. The list continues to develop and may lead anywhere but, according to Andrew, “I have a history here (at Bohemeo’s) and that history lays into the larger integration of what I have done with my career path.”
Andrew considers Bohemeo’s, “a cultural cornerstone.” It serves coffee, but also food, beer, wine and an artistic community. It’s a music venue, filling a niche nicely in a city where small concert spaces are waning. He said Cruiser Coffee Roasters, which owns and operates Bohemeo’s, is “immaculate. I mean, they’re a wonderful, wonderful roaster.” Their coffee is served in acclaimed Houston establishments like Brass Tacks, Caracol, Nancy’s Hustle and Nobie’s, to name a few.
“Bohemeo’s is actually nicer now than it used to be, like when I worked there. I was a barista and Taylor Gibson from (the Houston band) Jumprope was my general manager. You could come in at any time and catch one, if not both, of us sleeping on the couch while you’re trying to order coffee,” he said, admitting to being bad at the job. “I went in and Taylor trained me on how to make a latte and every latte that I made for the rest of the time I worked there was actually a cappuccino. I remember basically almost insisting that customers, if they didn’t say they wanted it for here, I would just automatically put it in a to-go cup, so I didn’t have to do coffee art for them.
“And that was something you could get away with it at Bohemeo’s but it was just because of the unsupervised nature and the trust and whatever,” he said.
During the pandemic, Andrew was burned out and looking for “the easiest job I can have. And I decided to take this job at Bohemeo’s and while I was working there, it was like every single day I worked there somebody would come in, whether it was Chris Dunaway or Mark Austin or anybody in between, and they would talk to me about what they’re doing, and I found myself being able to integrate and plug into what they were doing, literally just from proximity, just from standing across the counter from them at job that didn’t require much of me.
“You know, that was also where I met Dave Dove,” he said of Nameless Sound’s founder, an internationally renowned improvisational musician whom Andrew considers a true mentor. “Dave Dove would be my first customer of the day, many, many days, and this was right when I was feeling this kind of emotional fallout from playing in like four or five bands at a time and doing tour managing and running a label and running a venue, and I was like, I can’t do music anymore and Dave Dove found me and was just like, you should get into experimental performance and experiential art.
“If I was not there and if I had not met Dave, I would not be working at The Happening. If I had not met Dave, if I had not worked at Bohemeo’s, if I had not gone through the burnout of trying to do as much as I was doing, leading into the pandemic -there is a direct correlation between these things, and Bohemeo’s is like the linchpin in that connection between old Andrew and current Andrew.”
With Dove’s influence, Andrew got immersed in experimental art and now oversees The Happening, the always-free showcase for the genre, held the last Friday of each month at The Orange Show. The Happening’s ever-changing lineup of artists push creativity to the limit and challenge audiences.
“The Happening is like if experimental and performance art is the medicine, The Happening be it the cheese. You know, we will wrap it in cheese. We will make people love it, and hopefully they follow these artists, and they follow these other organizations and they get into it and The Happening is like an entryway.”
Andrew’s other selections, Campesino Coffee and OSO Coffee Co., are also favorites for how they convey the sense of community he’s seeking in a good café. The latter is a former Houston Press Best Of Houston® honoree.
“There are some complications with OSO in that obviously I’m trans,” Andrew said. “Hector (Garcia), the guy who owns OSO, he kind of got in this public scandal last year because he came out as having voted for Trump in the last election and he and I had a semi-public, not negative, but we had a public exchange where I was like, okay, well, so you voted for Trump and maybe you don’t agree with everything that’s going on with him and whatever, but me, as a trans person, if I come into your establishment and I use your bathroom, what are you going to do if somebody confronts me?
“His answer to that was very sufficient for me,” Andrew continued. “I mean, I consider myself a ‘transbassador,’ like, I have a lot of privilege. I’m white-presenting. I’m articulate. I am small in my stature, very non-threatening. So, I often find that I’m able to have more patience for people who have very different worldviews than mine because I’m not at the same threat level with them while I’m trying to have those conversations and Hector is one of those people.
“I’m not anti-Hector. I think that he has fallen victim to a lot of misinformation, which most people have, you know? I mean, I have these kind of conversations all the time, but that’s a role and a responsibility that I have taken on because it’s like if I don’t do this with all of my privilege, then I’m leaving other people to do it and they don’t have the same privilege that I do and maybe people won’t listen to them and maybe they don’t have the same tolerance that I do.
“You know, it’s just the work, but ultimately I think that OSO is a good place, and I think that Hector kind of learned his lesson from being so front-facing after the reaction to that,” Andrew said. “I know that if Hector is in the room, it doesn’t matter if I’m at OSO or Nickel City or Danny Speedo’s or wherever, I know that if Hector is in the room, that guy’s got me. And I think that’s really what community is. Community is not the idea of the people around you, it is the reality of the people around you.
“As a coffee shop goes? Incredible, you know, wonderful program. If I had to like chalk it up to OSO for one drink, I would probably go with their cortado. Like, damn, they structure it well, their machines are very well-calibrated. It is a flawless drink.”
“I really like Campesino because I feel like it’s kind of one of the last stands of the idea of a coffee house in Houston,” Andrew said of the Montrose area café which was recognized in a previous installment of this series. “In most other parts of the country, a coffee house is more common than a coffee business in a strip center or something, right?
“I would go there and I would get empanadas and my dirty chai latte,” Andrew said. “But I think Campesino, if I had to answer in very short why it matters to our cultural landscape, it’s because it is a coffee house and coffee houses are third spaces in the way that other cafés, like Tenfold, cannot be a third space. Bohemeo’s is like hyper third space, more third space than coffee house. But Campesino and OSO are somewhere in between.”
“So, it’s like, what does coffee mean?” Andrew asks, though it’s clear from our conversations what it means to him. “Coffee has turned into this thing where it’s like the culinary industry in Houston, where it’s very competitive and it does have standards and there are some that are better than others graded on the scale of what the individual is coming there for, right? And, these three places kind of cover a spectrum of what I think anybody could be looking for from a place that sells coffee.
“But for me, coffee has always been an accessory to the life you’re already living and it’s meant to be something that is more like an offering than a commodity,” he summarized. “I think that’s why Bohemeo’s could contend as my favorite coffee shop, because I really do not care if it’s Ethiopian or if it’s Peruvian or if it’s whatever. I need it in a cup and I need it fast and I need to get out to the patio because I’m going to talk to somebody, you know? And I need the person behind the counter to be some eccentric weirdo who in a few years is going to be doing their own thing and we met a few years back because they were working at freaking Bohemeo’s. Or vice versa.
“I think that coffee is like breaking bread. You can do it for yourself, but the best version of it is whatever you’re sharing with other people.”
