Bar Serves Up Coffee With a Slice of Life : Culture: Nick Sandro’s place has been serving expresso in the college town for 13 years. Customers say the ambience lets them be themselves.

Long before L.A. chic began pulsing to the caffeinated rhythms of cappuccino, Nick Sandro was busy serving up espresso at his small cafe in downtown Claremont.

This spring, while new coffee bars continue to spring up like latte- flavored mushrooms throughout Southern California, Nick’s Caffe Trevi enters its 13th year of operation, making it one of the oldest coffee bars in Southern California.

“When I got started, there weren’t many places like this around,” Sandro recalled. “Since then I’ve probably started four or five people in the coffee business myself, and I’ve watched the market grow.”

Until recently, Nick’s may have been the only espresso bar east of Pasadena, but caffe -culture appears to be spreading across the San Gabriel Valley. Jeanine Wilson, who opened the 222 Espresso Bar in Glendora one year ago, sees plenty of room for more coffee bars in the San Gabriel Valley’s eastern end.

“I don’t feel I have any direct competition in this area,” she said. “There’s one other place here in Glendora, but it closes at 5, and there’s a needlepoint shop in Covina that serves espresso in back, but that’s not quite the same thing.”

Still, it takes more than a hip ambience to make an espresso bar click. Kathy (she declined to give her last name), a server at the Espresso Bar in Pasadena, said she thinks that some newer coffee bars get off on the wrong foot.

“There have been several recent attempts to open places in Pasadena that have failed miserably. But they tended to be way more yuppified,” she said.

Not Nick’s. Hidden off an alley in Claremont’s Village area, Nick’s Caffe Trevi has the feel of a well-kept secret. To find it, first locate a brick walkway that leads off Yale Street just south of 2nd, then proceed past the restaurant and the hardware store. Make a left at the delivery truck, and you’re there.

The successful navigator is rewarded with not only a fine cup of coffee, but also the sensation that he or she is already an insider, one of the caffe cognoscenti.

Sandro describes his cafe’s interior as “a turn-of-the-century tavern that some hippies and beatniks got ahold of.” Dim illumination filters in through a skylight, casting deep shadows across wooden chairs and benches. Odd lamps and fixtures decorate the tables and walls. Bongos crowd a shelf behind the counter. An ivy-covered trellis provides shade for the outdoor patio.

Claremont’s various personalities--part college town, part suburban oasis, part bedroom community--do battle on a magazine rack, where titles as diverse as Smithsonian, the New Republic, the New Yorker and American Motorcyclist compete for space.

The service counter conveys fewer mixed signals. The traditional forms of liquid fare--everything from iced cappuccinos to double-decaf espressos--are complemented by an assortment of pastries, candies and hard Italian cookies called biscotti, which come with or without chocolate.

According to Nick’s clientele, what makes it a true caffe is the ambience, which is pretty much left up to them.

Leslie Palmer thinks of Nick’s as “a sort of an idea place. It’s a mix of culture and non-culture. You can talk about serious things there, or just about the good old days of ‘70s television.”

A recent weekend afternoon found a group of people discussing rap music in one dark corner, an undergraduate with a single shock of chartreuse hair reading “The Bell Jar” on the patio and two motorcyclists pulled up near the door. Elsewhere, an artist sketched with a quill pens, and a teen-age couple played chess.

The particular atmosphere depends largely on the time of day. According to Howard Drucker, a goateed former truck driver who is the cafe’s most tenured employee, “we get commuters and professors in the morning, students during the day and shopkeepers throughout the afternoon.”

Nighttime, however, is when the place really comes alive, Drucker said. “Claremont doesn’t offer much else in the way of night life. After 8 o’clock, Nick’s is pretty much the only place in town.”

On the other hand, Annick Garcia, a Nick’s regular, prefers the cafe’s earlier hours. “I used to like to go there at night because it’s a good place to study and smoke. But now I like to go in the morning because I can sit outside where it’s sunny.”

Unlike some Los Angeles caffes, Nick’s isn’t about glitz. “This isn’t a place that draws lots of flashy people,” Drucker said. “In fact, the only celebrities I can remember coming in here are the guy who wrote ‘Rain Man,’ and (guitarist) David Lindley.”

For Drucker, who considers himself not a coffee slinger but rather a barrista (“that’s Italian for bartender”), maintaining a low-key atmosphere is all-important. “When I go to a coffee bar in L.A., I get the feeling the establishment itself is the main attraction. Here, people are the attraction. It’s a place where people come to meet, to hang out and to find out what’s going on.”

Sandro said he was introduced to coffee through Cuban culture while serving in the Coast Guard in Florida. Then, living in Chicago, he saw “traditional Italian cafes thriving” in that city’s older neighborhoods.

Sandro decided to enter the coffee business when he moved to Claremont in the late 1970s. “My first location was a walk-up window inside a movie theater which had been converted to retail space,” he said. After eight years, during which Nick’s grew steadily in popularity, the cafe moved to its current, larger location.

“Now that I have a whole room,” Sandro said, “we can do a lot more.” The caffe hosts a number of special events, including musical performances, art shows, even the occasional poetry reading. Last December, for example, an open art show exhibited original works by many Nick’s regulars, artistically inclined and otherwise.

Tuesday nights feature music from The Real Time Jazz Band. A house ensemble of sorts, the group plays instruments such as clarinet, banjo, and washboard.

Drucker sees coffee bars like Nick’s occupying an increasingly central role in the cultural life of any community.

“Most people think of coffee as coffee,” Drucker said with a glint in his eye. “It’s not just a drink, it’s an attitude. We behind the counter at Nick’s like to think of ourselves as serving coffee to a tired world.”

Nick’s Caffe Trevi is located at 109B Yale Street in Claremont. Hours are 8 a.m. to 10 p.m., seven days a week.