Locally much-admired Asado Coffee on Irving Park near Southport will reopen Saturday with a new line of fair-trade organic roasts. The question of why it shut down, though, has gotten more mysterious. When it closed in late December the explanation given on its Facebook page was that it had been “ramsacked [sic], vandalized and overall not suitable for business.” But that Facebook message is gone now and there’s no mention of any such thing in a piece by Asado fan Mike Sula at the Reader’s blog; instead he reports that owner Kevin Ashtari felt the shop “had strayed from its original mission” (basically, it expanded from coffee to… coffee and tea) and Ashtari “just needed a break from it.” He’s slightly remodeled the shop to better facilitate coffee drinking (i.e., it sounds like he got rid of some of the tables to discourage sitting there all day), and… there will be cupcakes and muffins. (Mission creep!) [Reader]
