Art By Paula, Just Hold The Coffee Grounds

Paula Konareski likes to make her walls beautiful with art for her customers. And only once, years ago, did she exercise a little censorship: when the photos on the wall displayed drains clogged with food scraps and gobs of discarded coffee grounds.

You can’t really blame her.

The walls in question are at Cafe George by Paula. It’s an eatery beloved and well patronized, and a bit of a hidden treasure at 300 George St.

For 14 years Konareski, as owner and eclectic curator, has offered the space free of charge to budding and accomplished artists to display their work during the busy breakfast and lunch times, and reap 100 percent of the profits from sales.

The story of her gentle censorship — she actually asked the artist to take down the unappetizing images a few days before the end of the planned run — emerged Thursday night at the opening of the latest show, that of five photographers of colorful outdoor scenes who call themselves the Four Plus One.

Members of the venerable Greater Bridgeport Camera Club, the photographers are Pat Benham, Pat Brundage, Paula Hoostowski, Margi Montanaro, James Santerre, and Terri Smith.

They have a collective 60 works on display and for sale in the two rooms of Cafe George by Paula, which you reach by entering the 300 George St. building, owned by long-time developer Carter Winstanley, and inhabited by about 1,100 hungry bioscience-oriented tenants, said Konareski.

Half the cafe’s business is from the building’s residents and about half from the outside, including the hospital, Yale University, and lawyers from along the Orange Street legal corridor. That’s where Konareski, the daughter of a waitress who’s done just about every job in the food business, opened her first cafe, Paula’s on Orange, just above Grove Street.

When Winstanley, currently the landlord and developer of nearby 100 College Street, opened 300 George, she moved there. Without any advertising and any external signage, she has done so well that she also caters widely and staffs a grab-and-go mini-Paula’s in the lobby at 25 Science Park as well.

The customer demographic is mixed, she said, which is why she offers lunch that ranges from an inexpensive five dollars to about $12. ​“Our margins are small, we count on volume and it’s always a challenge,” she added.

Konareski grew up always around food in Meriden, where she helped her waitressing single mom as a ​“bus girl and a dessert girl.” She was at pains to thank her chef Matt Royack and her other 16 employees for making her own enterprise possible.

Over the 14 years she’s been at 300 George Street, Konareski’s walls have almost always shown art. Winstanley liked what she was doing so much, he decided to fill his corridors with local art as well, although Konareski doesn’t curate those areas, she said.

The current show displays images that are all or mostly outdoor scenes — riverine views, flowers photographed from near and far, and an incredibly detailed close-up of an eagle, a noble portrait appropriate for royalty among birds, that Hoostowski shot at a the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, R.I., at a specialized facility for injured avians.

The eagle was unable to fly, permitting Hoostowski, who has been an amateur yet serious photographer since 1971, to get very close.

The Greater Bridgeport Camera Club meets the first and third Wednesdays every month from September to May; it has organized outings for its members who go gallivanting with their cameras and often shoot the same scenes, enjoying each others’ company but also studying how each artist’s take on the same scene differs.

“We take [photos of] the same rose and mine is different from hers. The angle, the time of day,” Hoostowski said.

Santerre agreed with Hoostowski that the photography trips were all about friendship and love of photography, but that didn’t mean the photographers weren’t also competitive.

While the others in the group printed what they shot on paper, and without much alteration in the computer, apart from enlarging, Santerre said that he takes images, uses some software to create what he called a ​“painterly,” look and then prints them on canvas for an even more painterly effect.

This summer Konareski said she is going to do some long-overdue remodeling of the restaurant, improving the light in the front room — the back room is a sunny delight for display of images — and adding what she called a community table with wifi and stools, the better to internet while lunching, and look up, of course, to look at art.

The Four Plus One show runs through the end of summer, after which Konareski said she is looking for more artists interested in displaying. Contact her here.