Maybe it’s just the row of salvaged theater seats, but Citizen feels like a cool black-box theater—a performance space cobbled together on a shoestring budget and built in the middle of someone’s loft apartment. The top floor of the bi-level space has most of the seating, including a few couches and the theater seats, which are not the best crêpe-eating perches.

Unfortunately, as with so many community theaters, the space is more intriguing than the works presented. The crêpes are okay, but they’re often packed with far too many ingredients. The buckwheat “Citizen Crêpe,” for example, has grilled asparagus, spinach, bacon, and gruyère and the whole thing is topped with a squiggle of a crème-fraîche-based concoction. Somehow, it still manages to be bland. On the other end of the spectrum, a caramelized apple crêpe with sautéed apples and melted brie and walnuts comes to the table drenched in honey and winds up cloyingly sweet. Banh-mi-style sandwiches are good, especially salty roasted pork shoulder—but by good, we mean good for a coffeeshop.

And that’s really what Citizen is: a good coffeeshop. We have no complaints with the beans, and the fact that there’s also a very affordable wine list (it’s not a program with much depth, but they have sangría and $5 glass pours and all bottles are under $20) makes it easy to end the day here by transitioning from laptop hermit to social butterfly.