Four Star Coffee Bar closing hits close to home

by Kevin Buchanan of of West and Clear

By now, you’ve heard the news that the Four Star Coffee Bar, a Cultural District landmark, has closed. It’s certainly hit me - the Four Star was one of the best places in town. I went as far as calling it the Best Darn Coffee Shop in the West over a year ago on Fort Worthology. It’s been through several incarnations, some better than others - but its most recent was one of the best. The place had the “Fort Worth Feel,” as I call it. That’s what you get when you’ve got a place offering up top-quality eats/drinks/tunes in a cool but completely unpretentious atmosphere, attracting a wide variety of clientele. The sort of place where you can look at each table and see somebody different - cowboys, college kids, businessmen, and everything else you can think of, all having a great time. There are certain Fort Worth institutions that have the real Fort Worth Feel. Fred’s has it. The Scat Jazz Lounge has it. Piranha Killer Sushi has it. Spiral Diner has it in spades. So did the Four Star. It was a great place to hang out, relax, enjoy some great coffee and very tasty food while people watching. It truly had the Fort Worth Feel.

Turns out this whole deal is the result of a dispute over a grease trap. The Four Star and their landlord each thought it was the other’s responsibility to fix. The city was going to close the place down in 30 days if the trap wasn’t brought up to code, so Troy finally decided to just pack it in.

There is one silver lining on this cloud, however - the Four Star’s not going away completely. Dan McGraw at the Weekly reports that the Four Star’s less well known downtown location, on Houston Street in the rapidly heating up SoDo neighborhood near the Convention Center, is going to carry on. The downtown Four Star is actually quite cool - it’s got the right atmosphere. It’s smaller, and doesn’t have the famed Reading Room of the Cultural District location, but its heart’s in the right place. I truly hope Troy and/or some other Four Star folks are reading this, because I’m about to beg: please, please, please expand the downtown location’s hours. I hope the downtown location takes the hours of the original, in fact. I rarely ever get to go to the downtown spot, because of the severely reduced hours they keep. There’s a chance now to establish the downtown Four Star as a big thing, a local indie retreat downtown from the Starbucks of the world. Kick up the hours the way the old place had and get that place swingin’ at long last.

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