My best guess on how this went down:
1) The Gathering Place's lawyers sent a cease and desist order to the coffee shop.
2) The coffee shop ignored it either out of arrogance, ignorance, or fear.
3) The Gathering Place's lawyers probably sent a second request that also went nowhere so a simple civil lawsuit was filed, one that demanded financial damages from the coffee shop so he understands they don't like being ignored and possibly to make him sh!t himself a little.
4) The coffee shop owner proceeds to sh!t his pants, as any business owner would do when confronted with a big company threatening to sue them out of existence. To try to save face he makes a chest-pumping statement to the press about his legal team saying he would prevail when in truth his legal team is his paralegal cousin Eddie in Boise who hasn't returned his texts.
5) The Gathering Place's lawyers now go quiet so the coffee shop owner can sh!t himself a while longer. After nursing a 32oz bottle of Nyquil for a week he calls the lawyers up begging for mercy. Now that they have his attention and his balls in a vice they propose a simple $1 licensing agreement to use the name which probably entails a) How their trade dress is displayed in his coffee shop, website, flyers, etc. (plus notations of trademark ownership) b) How he can and can not use the name c) No more yapping to the press to try to angle this as a Samson vs Goliath story d) We better not hear any more complaints about your cappuccinos being skimpy on the foam from people coming to the park.
Most likely the coffee shop could have skipped from step 1 to step 5 had they just responded to the C&D letter (as I'm sure his cousin Eddie in Boise would have told him). Clearly TGP isn't a litigious company so they did the bare minimum they had to do to defend the trademark and avoid the potential of losing it in the future due to dilution. The coffee shop didn't size up their adversary properly as TGP isn't Ford and isn't doing this out of spite, then tried to bluff with a pair of twos, and ultimately got told but got lucky.