Sit in Café Espresso Roma long enough, watch the passage of time over enough coffee spoons or frenzied pinball games, and you begin to play an unwitting part in someone else's one-act day. Some crazy regular makes you part of his shtick. Then one day you're a regular and the act becomes yours and the coffee shop a personal extension, a home. Not a place that demands payment for its company, though that would be nice. Not a Starbucks, at any rate.
And if you consider Starbucks the standard, Roma—as its denizens know it—isn't a coffee shop at all. It's a place to kill an entire day. Maybe to sleep on its couch. To hear something new. Unlike Vegas, it doesn't move quickly. If you walk into this basement at 4440 S. Maryland Parkway and no one's behind the counter, understand that it's only because he or she is outside smoking. Just a second, a few more drags, and he or she will be with you. It's conducive to nothing as frenetic as Las Vegas.
Maybe Roma is what Las Vegas was. Before Steve Wynn. But Wynn's coming back. And, like progress, you can't keep Vegas at bay forever. Roma regulars know as much; they'll wait with smoky breath to see what, if anything, arises in Roma's place after it closes later this month.
"Lenadams Doris said it best, but I'll take credit for it," says former Café Espresso Roma Manager Andrew Ramsay about Doris, who, in the mid-1980s, opened the café that later became Roma: "Vegas can be summed up in one word: Next."
Roma held off next for almost 20 years. But on Thanksgiving, co-owner Ryan Pardey plans to hold a feast for invited guests. Then he will turn off the grinder for good.
"I started crying, literally, the other day," Pardey says. "I just can't make it. No matter how good next month is, it just seems that every day we stay open, we're digging in deeper."
He shouldn't feel bad. No one before him did much better.
Old-timers will tell you that the first visible, noticeable entry into what eventually became Roma's home was a stylish, 24-hour joint called The News Room. "It was a really beautiful café space," reminisces CityLife art critic Gregory Crosby. "It was gorgeous. They built a beautiful old wooden bar that jutted out from the counter. You could sit at the bar, and old wooden tables lined on the windows with banker's lamps at the tables that made it glow at night. It was heavenly; I lived there every night for six months."
A side room, which now houses a smoke shop, had a gallery with a baby grand piano and seating for events. "It was a labor of love," Crosby says.
Whatever the reason, somehow, someway, The News Room was eventually converted to Bad News; Doris, who could not be reached for comment, was no longer with the business, and the tenor of the place took a decidedly industrial turn.
"Bad News destroyed all that beauty and put in the concrete floor, metal chairs and the black-and-white tile, an industrialized chic sort of look," Crosby says. Around 1990, the Café Espresso Roma chain bought it. Since then, managers have come in, spent a few years, maybe a few months, then passed it onto new managers. There was Gina, then Andrew, and Andrew begot Josh and Josh begot Corey and Corey begot Ryan, who co-owns it with Wes Hines and Gary Tognetti. But until Ryan and his two buddies took over, few ever had to worry about making money.
"At the time I was there, the corporation had not stepped foot in the building for two and a half years," Ramsay says. There was rent to be paid, but not by him. "We could lose money, and we did. I'd make deposits and they'd send me supplies. It was the most hands-off corporate agreement I'd ever heard of. I don't think we ever cleared more than $250, $275 gross in one day."
The company didn't seem to care. Until early this year. When the Espresso Roma chain decided to close the place, Ryan et al took over. Pardey says the only real expense the three had was covering the $3,500 monthly rent. They thought it might be easy, especially if they got a wine and beer license (which costs $10,000), then started making improvements and buying new equipment. They also brought new ideas, like a B-movie night, jazz and more local and small bands touring from other parts of the country.
"Boy, we had a rude awakening," Pardey says. They could never get the money together for the wine and beer license.
Even in the shadow of a campus that boasts up to 30,000 full- and part-time students, even with the closure of the only other "bohemian" coffee shops in town—Café Copioh and Enigma (another Dorris enterprise)—within the last three years, Roma couldn't outdraw the nearby Starbucks or UNLV's own coffee shop in the new Lied Library. Whatever money is made goes for bills. Tips are the only wage. Pardey hasn't paid himself since spring. Then, Pardey says, they'd have big draws for the movies and bands, but the kids who showed up and got in free wouldn't buy anything. "If I had a dollar for everyone who said, 'Oh, I love the place,' and never end up coming here, we'd probably be rich," Pardey says.
Alas, people don't always mean what they say. Fewer know how to relax in environs that don't look like they were built two weeks ago. With its painted floor, make-shift air-conditioning system, its hung ceiling with a few panels missing, Roma is the antithesis of Summerlin or Green Valley.
"In Las Vegas, it's more about the material," says Ramsay, who now lives in Seattle. "And that is not Roma. It was not a place to get your coffee, it was an experience. You went there to escape other parts of Las Vegas, the Jitters and the Barnes and Nobles and the Wal-Marts that are Vegas. When you were in Roma, you were not in Las Vegas, you were in a larger city, a different place."
There is also, in Vegas, a fear that anything old, anything urban is something to be feared, something that holds danger. That's not always untrue.
They called him Two Heads of Lettuce because when they kicked him out, he was covered in blood, drunk as a monkey and carrying two heads of lettuce from the cooler. He came back last weekend and, attempting to break in, busted the front door.
Then there was Tommy, not his real name, a twentysomething with the face-boils of an entrenched meth habit. Another homeless Vegas teenager who grew up bumming smoke and coins at Roma. Rumor was he'd resorted to turning tricks in the bathroom. People tried to help him. When he was kicked out for good, he'd walk around the windows looking in.
Once, someone stole my wife's laptop from Roma's office. Another regular, a Metro cop, made it his personal mission to get it back. Three days later, a tweaker in a trench coat ran into the café, threw the laptop on a table and ran out.
These are frightful stories, perhaps, to college kids who either never had to see that kind of existence, or who saw it and don't want to see any more. "I've done a lot to chase off the dirt bags," Pardey says, smiling sadly. "But people are still kind of put off."
Roma was never Starbucks. It was more. Home, study hall, office, hangover cure, garage band tryout, poetry slam, smoke house, day care. Most cities, that's called a haven. In Vegas, it's just the recipe for a dying café.