Iconoclast brews coffee klatch

• No ordinary owner invented Rimsky-Korsakoffee, Sylvia Beach Hotel

By Shanna Germain

The Portland Tribune, Apr 19, 2002, Updated Oct 30, 2009

For Goody Cable, business is a tribal art.

Part artist, part idea machine, part socialite and full-time impresario of the funky Rimsky-Korsakoffee House in Southeast Portland and the renowned Sylvia Beach Hotel in Newport, Cable is a 24-karat Portland original.

Her businesses are geared less to yielding profits than producing interpersonal sparks.

She’s more interested in the art of stimulating memorable conversations among strangers Ñ which happens nightly at the communal tables in the Sylvia Beach dining room Ñ or offering a bizarre yet strangely romantic venue for after-dinner t�te-ˆ-t�tes and dessert at her coffeehouse.

“I’m a very noncorporate person in a corporate world,” Cable says. “What I value is not what corporations value. I’m not interested in making more than a living.”

Her real interest, she says, is the impact that businesses have on what matters to her Ñ the staff, the patrons, the community and the environment.

In his book “Beyond Civilization,” author and family friend Daniel Quinn Ñ who dedicated his novel “The Story of B” to Cable Ñ described Cable’s coffeehouse as a tribal business, one in which all the employees feel involved in, responsible for and rewarded by the success of the business.

“No one involved was ever going to go without food, shelter or support in troubled times,” Quinn says in an e-mail interview.

Cable sees Portland as something of an oasis in a world where small businesses are a dying breed: “I think Portland is a place where small businesses shine. Those of us who own small businesses here know each other and support each other.

“I’m a great believer in family-run business. And I’m one of those people who totally gets by with the help of her friends and family. Our country’s in desperate need of extended family, and we should propagate it whenever we can.”

The Rimsky is pure Cable.

“I’m an artist by nature,” says Cable, 56, the daughter of Willard and Anne Michalov Jonson, both of whom were Works Progress Administration artists in the 1930s. “But I’m too gregarious to sit at home with a canvas, so I had to find a way to create canvases that had people as part of them.”

More than 20 years ago, she bought a run-down 1902 Victorian house at 707 S.E. 12th Ave. and turned it into a musical, magical place where tables move of their own accord, the cups are mismatched and the guests on any given night may be greeted by a server decked out in a gorilla suit.

Named after 19th-century Russian composer Nikolay Rimsky-

Korsakov, the coffeehouse was

Cable’s way of holding music parties without having to clean up her house afterward. By serving only coffee, tea and dessert, Cable hoped to keep the focus on the interaction between people rather than the food.

For years there was no sign on the place other than the one in the front window that read “Under No Management.”

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