New Cyber Cafe Serves Up Food For Thought Via Internet Connection

Plenty of people like to read or work while they eat. That’s one thing nice about most weekday breakfasts. Everybody eats at different times so it’s fine to ignore the family and read the newspaper. Remember the early days when you arranged the cereal boxes so your folks thought you were reading them but you were actually trying to not see your siblings?

Well, at the Cyber Cafe you’ll be looking straight ahead too - but this time it’ll either be at a computer terminal or watching someone else play with Internet.

The Inland Northwest’s first Cyber Cafe opens Friday in the rear of the Taco Dude Restaurant at 415 Sherman Ave., Coeur d’Alene. The restaurant will have three Internet terminals that may be rented by time sequences. Customers can check their E-mail for about $1.75 for 15 minutes. Or business people, college students or the curious can rent the machines for $3.50 for a half hour or $6 an hour.

Of course, while you’re there they want to sell you a decent meal. The menu is completely separate from Taco Dude, with the features including hot pastas, large salads, deli sandwiches, pastries and beverages. Decorated with a large mural, the cafe seats 19 people.

An employee will be available to help with the machines most of the time, and owners Tom and Lee Ann Blount will open the terminals for school field trips.

The Blounts opened Taco Dude last May after coming from Hawaii, where they had a similar restaurant. Hours will be 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Wednesday and until 9 p.m. Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

Cyber Cafe opens Friday. Hope they can keep coffee and crumbs out of the keyboards.

The old Ekness Meats building in the northeast corner of Highway 95 and Dalton Avenue will become the new, expanded home of Black Canyon Oak this weekend.

Leaving its 11-month-old home on Fourth Street, Coeur d’Alene, the furniture store will expand from about 4,000 to 6,000 square feet and enjoy better exposure, explained Jerry Lambert, who owns the business with his wife Tammy and brother-in-law Gary Parkinson. The new space will enable the business to expand its furniture inventory and add more leather upholstery services.

The Lamberts came to Idaho 21 years ago from Colorado.

Meanwhile, across Highway 95, Koerner Furniture may add 8,000 square feet to its existing 25,000-square-foot store just south of the intersection’s southwest corner.

Rich Koerner attributes the store’s success to the growth of the area, good service and prices that are competitive with Spokane stores. Koerner owns the store with his wife Barbara (the Roseanne-sounding New Jersey accent on the Koerner radio commercials).

The Koerners started in Coeur d’Alene with a 4,500-square-foot unfinished furniture store on Fourth Street 18 years ago. They now have 18 employees and will add more with the expansion.

Furniture, but of the antique variety, also is one of the products of the Hayden Mercantile, a new business at 9428 Government Way (next to Napa Auto Parts).

The antiques are the specialty of Nettie Spencer, one of three owners and a Nebraska native who formerly sold antiques in Sandpoint. Connie Dempsey, a Spokane native and long-time Coeur d’Alene resident, sells new, casual clothes and previously had the Connie’s Casuals store. And Johanne Haymond, a Quebec native, operates an in-store hair salon. All three combine to sell gift items, including glassware and jewelry.

The store is open Monday through Saturday.

Roll out’a bed early next Wednesday to beat your neighbors.

Coeur d’Alene’s new Safeway store opens at 7 a.m. for the rest of its life. Open 24 hours, the 57,000-square-foot store employs 145 people in its departments, including produce, seafood, meats, dairy, bakery, pharmacy, photo-video, customer service, floral and a deli and China Express food area that will offer a dining area as well as take-out.

Dale Schaak came from Wenatchee to manage the store. Retaining the downtown store, Coeur d’Alene has Safeway’s only Idaho stores. The Oakland, Calif.-based chain has 1,060 stores, primarily in the Western states, Canada and Washington, D.C.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Nils Rosdahl The Spokesman-Review