A few months ago, a neighborhood coffee shop bit the dust as Mazag Cafe, a quaint little Mediterranean spot run by a friendly mother-daughter team, shuttered its doors after about two years at the corner of 10th and Carpenter Sts. One would think that a place serving up the essentials: coffee beverages, breakfast sandwiches, pastries and the like, would be embraced by the neighborhood, but it seems that things just didn’t work out. Before Mazag Cafe took over the space, InFusion Coffee & Tea of Mt. Airy transformed the space into a coffeehouse, only to close about a year and a half later. They too, served the typical coffeehouse fare of coffee, pastries, teas and smoothies. Both cafes also benefited from outdoor seating and faced quaint Bardascino Park, where you can watch people play bocce ball, catch a concert, or eavesdrop on the old Italian men chatting the day away, while sipping your latte.

Luckily for Bella Vistians (Bella Vistarians? Bella Vistos? Eh, you get the point), Filter Cafe of Old City is opening one of many planned new locations in the turn key coffee shop space. Filter touts themselves as “Philadelphia’s only REAL cyber cafe,” offering free wi-fi, PC workstations, printing, scanning, and of course, the requisite floppy disk drives (seriously). Filter features local Bucks County Coffee, countless tea options, and offers heartier fare like sandwiches, wraps, bagels, and maybe a salad bar.

We always hate to see any place close up shop, but we’re pleased to see the space filled so quickly- we hate vacant commercial space so much. Two coffee concepts have not survived at this corner, and we’re not sure whether it’s due to lack of foot traffic, poor execution, or whether the corner is simply cursed. With other locations to take the financial burden off of this new one, it seems that Filter Cafe will at least have a higher margin for error than its predecessors. With that, along with some new product offerings, we’re confident that they’ll be able to give the neighborhood what it wants, even if the neighborhood doesn’t know it yet. They’ll officially open for business next week.