March 3, 2009 - I planned to bicycle to Emil Lester's new coffee shop in Lawrenceville yesterday morning. Then I got wind of the chill factor and didn't fancy my fingers being pried from the handlebars.

So I took a couple of buses. I might have taken a company car to the City Cafe at 4502 Butler St., but that is no way to visit Mr. Lester.

He's not merely a cyclist. He would like Pittsburgh to "declare war against the car."

Last December, I wrote an innocent little column about recycling leaves and he sent me an e-mail that included lines like:

"The car and its pernicious effects surround us; there is no profound insight there. Ways to get around our petroleum addiction are not so transparent. ... By virtue of our geography, Pittsburgh is not well suited for the car. ... Time to paint a world with something else. You can start by getting rid of your car."

I e-mailed back with the suggestion that it may be easy for a single guy to get along with just two wheels, but our family of four wasn't giving up its station wagon.

He then suggested that I "not step into environmentalism; it's a war that needs soldiers."

I suggested he stuff his sanctimony in his compost heap. "Environmentalism is the new narcissism masquerading as altruism," I e-mailed. Its "soldiers" don't impress me nearly as much as they impress themselves.

We went back and forth for a while. Mr. Lester can do that to a guy, even one who considers himself a pretty good friend of the Earth.

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That said, Mr. Lester can be as engaging as he is exasperating, and while his quixotic devotion to reducing pollution may not be for everyone, there's a genuine dignity in his struggle. As one who enjoyed his City Cafe on Market Square during its one-year run ending last April Fool's Day (no lie), I'd like his new place to thrive.

Mr. Lester, 56, grew up in Mount Oliver, graduated from South High School in 1970, did a hitch in the Navy, and came back to Pittsburgh to earn a bachelor's degree in economics from Duquesne University.

He moved to San Francisco in 1976, spent more than a decade there, and then began bouncing around the West. In his time he has designed and built flower stands and coffee carts, owned a restaurant and catering business, an electric sign business and a soda distributorship, and he's been a graphic artist. After San Francisco, he lived and worked in Medford, Ore., Denver and Phoenix. He moved back here in 2004 after his divorce.

He opened the new City Cafe three weeks ago. He makes the half-hour bike ride from his Point Breeze home to open at 6 a.m. and stay open until 6 p.m., seven days a week.

It's a nice little place, with a raised patio that should draw a crowd when the weather warms. Mr. Lester discourages buying coffee to go, wanting customers to sit, relax and enjoy, with porcelain cup and saucer. He won't allow customers to drink from paper cups inside or on the patio.

He hates garbage, you see. If you want a straw with your fresh-squeezed juice, you'd better take it when you go. He's a vegetarian who composts and recycles and claims he has never had to put any residential garbage out at the curb in the five years since his return to Pittsburgh.

I was the only guy in the coffee shop for a while, and he told me weekdays have been dead thus far, but Gary Halliday of Regent Square stopped in late in the morning. He'd also been a customer of the short-lived shop in Market Square.

"I like the social aspect," Mr. Halliday said, as our conversation bounced from pop music to the future of newspapers. "I like the formality of the cup and saucer. And he's actually a very good cook.''

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City Cafe offers an avocado-and-cheese sandwich, a hummus platter, an all-day breakfast menu, and pastries and biscotti from La Peri Dolci in Penn Hills. Nora Graves, Amy Graves and Andreana Crance, in town on a museum-and-zoo visit from suburban Buffalo, happened in yesterday and gave a particularly big thumbs-up to the fresh-squeezed apple juice.

Mr. Lester does it all. He can't afford help. This is his seventh business in his fifth city and he says, "I have to make this place work."

But he'll do it his way. He'll tell you matter-of-factly, with a disarming smile, "A car is inelegant, it stinks and it's polluting the city.''

Knowing he has two adult sons, I asked him how he would have managed raising them with just a bicycle.

"I wouldn't have," he conceded.

That concession was even better than his coffee.

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/09062/952782-155.stm?cmpid=oneill.xml

Publication: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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