On Monday,
we noted that Molecule, aka the Water Café, was now open on East 10th Street. Serena Solomon at
DNAinfo went to check it out for a feature yesterday .... the store here between First Avenue and Avenue A has a custom-made, $20,000 filtering machine to remove the city water "heavy with chlorine, fluoride and compound metals" and returns it to its purest form.
Co-owner Adam Ruhf said that he "knows first hand the healing properties of purified water, claiming that drinking it regularly helped eased the pain caused brought on by two serious car accidents that left him without a spleen and a leg held together with metal pins."
Aside from selling single servings of the water in the shop (16 ounces for $2), the store will also have a delivery service for East Village residents seeking 3 or 5 gallons of purified water for the home.
Read the whole article
here.
Meanwhile, this morning.
The Wall Street Journal features the store as well, pointing out that water quality has long been a source of pride for New York City. However, Ruhf, described as "a former world champion boomerang player, musician and self-described social-justice activist" who moved here from California a year ago, countered that the water in NYC is "terrible."
"I don't want chemicals in my water. I don't even want chlorine in my water. Chlorine is like bleach. Do you want to drink bleach?"
Anyway,
per the article:
To counteract critics, Molecule is planning a weekly naming ceremony to imbue its water with personality and Sunday blessings involving religious figures from all faiths, including Tibetan monks and pagan worshipers.
Finally, the Molecule media tour continues this morning with a scathing review by Steve Cuozzo in a
Post piece
titled "Molecule bottled water is ‘pure’ nonsense."
My editors asked me to turn my famously infallible palate loose on a blind-tasting of Molecule, three popular bottled waters and ordinary, unimproved tap water.
Guess what? Molecule was the only one I didn’t like.
The
Post also had a video feature...
[
Image of Adam Ruhf by Serena Solomn]