The Backdoor Cafe

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The Backdoor Cafe

13 Apr

Wow. This place really brought back memories. Backdoor Cafe, you see, is located in downtown Carlisle. Why is that important to me? Well, Carlisle was always on the road between my house and Shippensburg. When I went to Shippensburg University I was constantly commuting through Carlisle, and this little coffee house was one of my favorite hangouts back in college days. I had a few friends who went to Dickinson College, so little Carlisle ended up being the hub of my social life for a while. This cafe has been a hub of the Carlisle social scene for quite some time, and I was pleasantly surprised to see that it survived the recession intact.

It’s called the Backdoor Cafe because…well…you enter in the back of the building, even though it looks like there’s a perfectly good door in the front. The original door is actually still tacked up on the brick facade when you walk back to the real entrance.

Inside, the cafe is pretty dark, but I like it that way; it’s a bit cavern-like, but then again it just comes across as cozy on a rainy day. Carlisle is a college town, and the cafe’s atmosphere really fits that. It’s a place you’d come to socialize after class or sit by the windows and do homework and just relax. That’s the best way to describe the darkness of the place…chill.

The coffee was deceptively good. What do I mean by that? Well, when you come in and look at the coffee being brewed, it’s not brewed in a fancy system and put into decanters like most coffee at college-town cafes. It’s brewed in two pots, orange and brown, like you’d find at a diner or fast food restaurant. This wasn’t fast-food coffee by any means though. It was a nice, perky, mild (a bit too mild for my taste) blend that I didn’t have much time to learn about…but did take a photo of before I ran out the door to the comic book convention that was the primary mission that day. Yeah, a lot of crazy stuff happens in Carlisle.