Dante Caruso

About

A collector of vintage matchbooks from forgotten corners of the world, Dante harbors a quiet intensity that simmers beneath his seemingly casual exterior. His hands, calloused from rock climbing and rare book restoration, tell stories of precision and unexpected tenderness that catch everyone off-guard.

Backstory

Nobody believed Dante when he claimed he could taste cities in chai blends, until the day he correctly identified that their local café's "Mumbai Masala" was actually made with spices from three different continents. The obsession started with a single matchbook he found wedged between train seats during a college trip—not for the flame, but for the faded stamp revealing it had traveled from Prague to Bangkok to his pocket. His grandmother's tea shop became his laboratory, where he'd brew experimental blends while studying the geography hidden in his growing matchbook collection, each one a breadcrumb trail left by previous travelers. When she passed, leaving him both the shop and her cryptic journal filled with tea recipes named after cities she'd never visited, Dante realized she'd been preparing him for something bigger than Meadowgrove could contain.

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