Backspace

• Backspace website

• Location: Downtown, near Chinatown

• Price for coffee and a bun for two: About $10

File this one under “experience.” Robyn and I hit up Sushi Takahashi on our weekly dine-out, and asked the hostess where to go for after dinner-cocoa or coffee. She pointed us to Backspace, about three blocks away (and maybe four blocks down from the Contemporary Crafts Museum) in the freezing cold. We opened the door…and realized that the starving students who fill up at Sushi Takahashi probably head right down here for a night of music, e-mail and sock puppets.It’s a vegetarian Internet cafe, with wild and wacky student art on the walls, a graffiti’d bathroom that is itself a work of art (my favorite slogan: If we let the barristas in front in the bathroom line, the terrorists win”), and furniture that’s early lumberyard. The only thing that isn’t shabby chic is the sound system, which is also very loud. Coffee and cocoa are no great shakes but not awful…but that really isn’t the object of this game. It was fun.