Guest Commentary
Ode to The Ritual Café, Downtown Des Moines
10/1/2025Bohemian waystation for 20 years —
peace symbols, feminist aura, their decidedly granola menu.
Smoothies and bars, quiches and cookies, oolong tea and Mayan mochas.
Open-air ambience when its oversized, street-facing doors were raised on high.
Incense and black candles. Protest posters, upping awareness, on every wall.
Gold velveteen sofa in one corner atop an elevated platform,
where would-be poets, philosophers and truth-tellers felt safely cocooned,
opining random words to an attentive, unrandom assemblage.
In an earlier era, they’d be called out as losers, draft-dodgers and freaks.
Perhaps, the former — and the latter — might still apply … to some.
• • •
Shuttered. CLOSED PERMANENTLY, Google says.
Where, now, will all the hipsters gather? ♦
