The Café Formerly Known as Brioche

Sunday, January 30, 2011 — Sara asked, in a Comment on yesterday’s Beer Girl post, “is there some issue with Breaking New Grounds I don’t know about that you won’t mention their name?”

In a word, yes. Café Brioche welcomed The New Hampshire Gazette. We used to distribute more than 5,000 copies of the paper there during the course of a year.

After Brioche closed, we asked the new management at that site if we could continue distributing papers there. The answer was “No.” That was, of course, their prerogative. That decision, though, forced us to find and install the red plastic distribution box which can now be found near the Chamber of Commerce’s information kiosk.

Installing that box required us to apply for a sidewalk obstruction permit from the City. One prerequisite for that permit is an insurance policy. The policy indemnifies the City for up to $1 million, just in case our distribution box goes berserk and injures someone. The policy costs us about five hundred dollars a year.

The Café Formerly Known as Brioche is under no obligation, legal or moral, to allow us to distribute our newspaper on their premises. We have no problem with that.

On the other hand, no one who has caused us thousands of dollars in unnecessary expense is going to get any free publicity from us.

2 thoughts on “The Café Formerly Known as Brioche”

  1. Portsmouth isn’t what it used to be. Now its overrun by “beautiful people”, their tiny dogs, BMW’s, and million dollar condos. So its not surprising that you are finding it hard to find places to distribute a potentially subversive, truthful, common-sense oriented paper. Beautiful people can’t be bothered with such noble causes because it interferes with their manny-pedi schedules.

  2. I can’t blame you about the new cafe. Don’t get me wrong, I think the growth in Portsmouth with all the new shops and restaurants is great. But it has lost some of its down-to-earth feel. Like when Eileen Foley took care of the least among us. People like Bob “BJ” Johnson roamed the streets and schooled kids in the blues. You could jam at Rosa’s. Shoot the breeze at Emilio’s. There were actually places in town for kids to hang out. There was only one person ticketing shoppers. Now there’s an army chasing them away. Ok, end of rant.

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