GARDEN GROVE : Cafe Auto Spa: Clean Car With Your Coffee

The City Council has cleared the way for a new carwash that will also offer cappuccino, espresso and French pastries to customers.

The Mediterranean-style facility, with hand-carved stone columns, tile roofs and palm trees, also may include a boutique and gift shop.

Dubbed the Cafe Auto Spa, the facility will offer customers nothing but the best when it opens next year, general partner Alan Gordon said.

“It’s like going to the Ritz,” he said.

Carwashes are expected to cost $6.99, cappuccino $2 and espresso $1, Gordon said.

Gordon now runs a tire store where he plans the auto spa, and the two will operate in tandem, Gordon said.

“We’ll have the capacity of handling 400 cars a day with 1,600 tires,” Gordon said. “You can’t tell me that one of them won’t have a bad tire and I won’t be able to sell somebody one.”

Gordon said he’ll be affiliated in the venture with Raymond and Richard Gall, partners in the Cafe Auto Spa that opened in Tustin earlier this year.

“We’ve received an overwhelming response from the community,” Richard Gall said. “It was better received than expected.”

Gall said that the traditional carwash is “ugly, noisy, obnoxious and dysfunctional,” where owners don’t get the treatment they--or their $40,000 to $70,000 vehicles--merit.

The Garden Grove facility will be located at Garden Grove Boulevard near Knott Street and the Garden Grove Freeway and will be the first commercial enterprise that motorists see as they enter the city from Long Beach.

The council last week approved an amendment to a planned unit development to allow carwashes with approval of a conditional use permit.