By Sasha Park · Republished 2026-05-16 · Originally reported by Richard Horgan on FishbowlLA, April 2013
In late April 2013, NPR’s The Salt food blog ran a profile of John A. Rippo, publisher of the San Diego monthly The ESPRESSO and its companion daily website. The piece was part of NPR’s themed “Coffee Week” — an early-2010s NPR food-coverage initiative across multiple shows. The original FishbowlLA framing picked up the SoCal cafe-culture-versus-laptop-culture argument that The ESPRESSO and a parallel Highland Park LA cafe had each been making.
Then
John Rippo had been publishing The ESPRESSO across years as a small-circulation monthly with a daily website at theespresso.com. The NPR profile foregrounded Rippo’s argument that contemporary coffee houses had lost the social-gathering function they had originally served — that they had become silent laptop-and-cellphone work spaces, “an office without cubicles” rather than the conversation rooms they had been for centuries.
The original FishbowlLA piece picked up the argument and the comments thread on the NPR post — including a comment from Tempe-based barista Thomas Bonacci who described the experience of disconnecting the Wi-Fi at Steve’s Espresso in Arizona. The local-news pickup of the Wi-Fi disconnection had been part of the broader cafe-culture-versus-remote-work conversation that was building across SoCal and the Southwest in the early 2010s.
The LA tie that pulled the story into FBLA coverage was Cafe de Leche, the Highland Park coffee shop that had decided to turn off Wi-Fi on weekends for similar reasons. FBLA had originally covered Cafe de Leche in late 2010; the April 2013 piece confirmed that the weekend-Wi-Fi-off policy was still in place two and a half years later. The recurring-LA-coverage thread was characteristic of the FBLA editorial practice of tracking small cultural-policy decisions across multi-year timeframes.
Now
NPR’s The Salt food blog has continued operating across the years, eventually consolidating into the broader NPR food and lifestyle coverage. NPR’s themed weeks — Coffee Week and its many counterparts — have continued as a recurring NPR programming framework.
The cafe-culture-versus-laptop-culture argument that the 2013 piece foregrounded has been substantially resolved in favor of the laptop-and-Wi-Fi structure across most of the SoCal cafe market. The 2020 pandemic-era remote-work explosion made the Wi-Fi-on default effectively universal; even the holdout shops that had been Wi-Fi-off in the early 2010s have substantially capitulated.
Cafe de Leche has continued operating in Highland Park across the entire interval. The Wi-Fi-off-weekends policy was eventually phased out across the post-2015 years as the cafe expanded; the broader Highland Park gentrification trajectory has reshaped the neighborhood substantially across the same window.
The ESPRESSO and its website continued under John Rippo for years after the 2013 profile. The publication’s continuing role as one of the small-circulation San Diego monthly cultural-press operations has been more durable than the broader print-monthly-cultural-press category across the same interval.
The 2013 piece reads now as one of the small documented moments when the cafe-culture-and-Wi-Fi argument was still being held as an active editorial position by SoCal cafe owners — before the pandemic-era remote-work consolidation made the Wi-Fi-on default effectively non-negotiable. The piece’s choice to pick up both the SD and Highland Park cases, eighteen months apart, captured a small slice of the SoCal cafe-policy conversation that has since substantially closed.
Original report archived on the Wayback Machine.