By John Katsilometes
Rejavanate Coffee Lounge, one of the city’s few hangouts with a cultural pulse, has been sold. Those who favor local flavor can be happy it was not sold to Starbucks, but rather to a couple of former Navy men who promise to retain and even enhance Rejavanate’s brief but rich history as a community-minded java bar.
The new owners are John Abbas and Hercules Cummings (which sounds like a Greek adult film star, but that is his real name), who met in boot camp a few years ago. Both have served in the Navy, off the coast of Iraq in the Persian Gulf. Abbas completed his Navy duty and moved to New Orleans to help with Hurricane Katrina cleanup and rebuilding efforts (he wound up starting a small construction company in the region, which spun into its own disaster, but I digress). Cummings finished his tour earlier this year, and the two celebrated by taking a trip to Amsterdam.
(This saga does wind up in Vegas, trust me.)
During the Amsterdam vacation, Abbas and Cummings took notice of the country’s innumerable coffee shops. The seed, or in this case “bean,” was planted. The two had friends in Las Vegas, which has a dearth of independent coffee houses – Rejavanate being an exception – and soon moved to town. As Abbas and Cummings sniffed around, asking for advice about how to actually open a coffee lounge, Rejavanate owners Andrew Conlu, Bruce Ewing, Greg Davis and Fred Harmon unexpectedly decided to sell the business. Ewing and Davis, who managed the business day-to-day since it opened in November 2004, already had full-time jobs. Ewing is a member of “Phantom – Las Vegas Spectacular”; Davis is a church pastor and both are former members of “Forever Plaid.” The former Navy men were swiftly able to pull together enough funds, with the help of a silent partner and a not-so-silent partner, Abbas’s mother, Karen Kinsman, to buy Rejavanate.
The club, at 3300 E. Flamingo Road in the Renaissance III shopping center, turned over two weeks ago. Abbas and Cummings plan on keeping it a locally rooted business and promoting it as a center for philanthropic activity and an asylum for emerging artists. Next week, local pop artist and DJ Medema (who goes by The Artist, Medema, actually) will start work on a mural of life-size paintings of Martin Luther King, Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Mother Theresa.
And the lounge will continue to serve Café D’Art Italian roast coffee, the blend for which it is known. As Abbas says, “We are not messing with the coffee.”
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Somewhere in our culture, this is a pertinent question: Will Lynette Boggs’ legal entanglements lead to her removal from the Miss America Organization?
Boggs was named to the board a couple of years ago as the pageant moved to Las Vegas, infiltrating the Aladdin (now Planet Hollywood) Theatre for the Performing Arts. Boggs is a former Miss Oregon (duck!) who strutted the stage at the 1990 Miss America Pageant. She and Lynn Weidner represent Las Vegas on the MAO board; Weidner, the wife of Sands Chief Executive Officer William Weidner, was Miss New Jersey in the 1971 Miss America pageant when she was Lynn Hackerman. Boggs is still listed as a member of the board on the MAO official Web site, but I’m awaiting word back from Team Tiara on her official status. We’ll see if the organization that stripped Vanessa Williams of the 1984 title for, well, stripping, will continue to keep Boggs aboard.
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Zooropa, ’07: The discount site travelzoo.com is offering a three-day sale for tickets to “Le Reve” and “Monty Python’s Spamalot” (33 percent off), “Phantom” ($40 off), Gordie Brown at the Venetian (two-for-one); Hans “Turn Back The” Klok and Pam Anderson at Planet Hollywood (prices start at $35), “Stomp Out Loud” at PH (top seats are $35 off), and “Tony n’ Tina’s Wedding” at the Rio ($49). Go there – to that site – for details.
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Vegas moment: On Monday night, at about 9:45, we tried to have dinner at Makino Seafood Restaurant at the Las Vegas Premium Outlets on Grand Central Parkway. When we parked, an occasional security guard reminded us that the mall closed at 10 (“Sorry folks, the park’s closed, the moose out front should have told ya.”). He directed us to the shopping center’s side entrance, which is easy to find because it is fairly buried beneath the day’s trash. We stepped through the Maze of Glad to reach the restaurant, where we were told that they would close in 10 minutes -- but that we could enjoy the all-you-can eat special for those 10 minutes. As delicious as that prospect seemed, we left, but if I ever write a song its title will be, “Ten Minutes O’ Sushi.”
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On our menus: Returning to Rejavanate, the Italian Steamer – which is neither a train engine nor Ronco appliance – goes for $1.65.
Plate in my head: The imagination is aflame for the driver of the red Dodge Durango with the plate PYRO1.
Fabulous Las Vegas appears daily (well, almost) at this Web site. John Katsilometes can be reached at 990-7720, 812-9812 or at [email protected]