Thank God Wormhole Is Still There
Wicker Park's nerd fever dream of a coffee shop is also one of the best in the city
I feel bad for whoever has to dust this place.
Wormhole Coffee is what happens when someone who takes coffee very seriously also refuses to take minimalism seriously. Star Wars toys. Original Macintosh computers, some still running. Old Nintendo games on a tube CRT television. A life-sized cardboard cutout of Buffy. International movie posters. A full-sized DeLorean. It has a flux capacitor. Your eyes never fully settle because there is always something new to find in whatever corner you haven't looked at yet.
I tend toward Nordic roasts and the coffee shops that come with them; clean lines, warm wood tones, plywood furniture made to look expensive, deliberate quiet. Wormhole is the complete opposite of all of that. It is a millennial nerd in full detox from a missed morning coffee. It is a fever dream that somehow also pulls excellent espresso.
That last part is what matters most. Strip away the bric-a-brac, the soundtrack, the DeLorean, and what you have underneath is a roaster that takes its coffee seriously and trains its baristas to match. Wormhole gets genuinely busy, as in line-out-the-door, thirty-drinks-deep busy, and the quality doesn't buckle. The drinks stay good. The baristas stay friendly. They are still having fun at cup twenty-eight, which is either a testament to the hiring or the caffeine or both.
The donuts have the same personality as the shop — a little messy, quite tasty. Large communal tables fill up fast with laptop workers who somehow manage to focus inside the cacophony of it all. Out front, a reclaimed parking spot serves as a patio.
What Wormhole does that matters beyond the coffee is hold a mirror up to what Wicker Park used to be. The main strip of Milwaukee Avenue now has Abercrombie, Adidas, and Supreme as neighbors. These stores didn't give Wormhole legitimacy. They moved next to Wormhole to borrow some of its credibility. Eclectic, thrifty, chaotic, a little punk. It stands as a reminder that the neighborhood had a soul before the retail chains arrived and still has one because places like this refused to leave.
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