Café Nervosa

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Café Nervosa is a fictional coffee shop featured in the American television sitcom Frasier. It is fictively located on the corner of the real-world 3rd and Pike Streets in Seattle and is portrayed as being just across the street from the also fictional KACL Radio Studios. As such, many of the KACL staff go there during their free time, including Frasier Crane and his family.[1] It is a prominent location in the series and the episode My Coffee with Niles was set entirely within the cafe.

The cafe's name, Nervosa, is a feminine Italian and Latin adjective, meaning "nervous", as well as a psychological term meaning "the debilitating psychological addiction to an object, belief or behavioral pattern." It can also refer to "coffee nerves" – a condition caused by drinking too much coffee. ("Mr. Coffee Nerves" was an advertising character used to sell the coffee substitute Postum.) On the show, the coffee shop was in fact named after its owner, Maureen Nervosa.

The staff of the cafe has changed over the years, although one waitress (whose name was never mentioned, but who was portrayed by actress Luck Hari) was there for 4 years and in the later seasons of the series, a waiter named James was a permanent fixture at the cafe. The character Daphne Moon's mother Gertrude also worked there for a while. Pauley Perrette (credited simply as Pauley P.) did a two-episode stint as waitress Rebecca in season four. In the story, the cafe has a number of regulars, including the Crane family and friends, and it is where Frasier and his brother Niles Crane often meet up to discuss various topics.

The cafe serves a wide variety of coffees and also serves food such as biscotti and bran muffins.

The producers of Frasier decided[citation needed] that a non-work, non-home setting for Frasier would be a coffee shop, as Seattle is well known for them. They also made sure there were no stools in the cafe, to differentiate it from the Cheers bar back in Boston, where Frasier Crane had previously resided.

The imaginary cafe has been the subject of a marketing tie-in cookbook, Café Nervosa: The Connoisseur's Cookbook (Oxmoor House, ISBN 0-8487-1550-0).[clarify]

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