When one great London coffee shop dared another great London coffee shop to park its espresso cart on its premises everyone’s first thought was smackdown. But the docking of Flat Cap, as Notes Music Coffee mobile units are known, at Prufrock Coffee on London’s Leather Lane was the main event of a “friendly” pop-up I organised to celebrate the release of Katie Parla’s Rome For Foodies Dining App and welcome back an old and much maligned favourite from Italy: the traditional cappuccino. [Read more...]
CoffeeSaturday Falls Back in Love With Cappuccino
18 January 2012 By Leave a Comment
No Coat, No Table
My wife, our baby and I were patiently waiting fourth, fifth and fifth-and-a-quarter on the line to place an order at the Columbus location of Joe the Art of Coffee, a busy coffee shop near both the real and fictional Upper West Side apartments of Jerry Seinfeld. When a table opened up I told my wife, a polite Englishwoman, to grab the table and sit down with the baby. I’d get the coffees. But just as my wife was laying claim to the table the bored sophomore who was standing ahead of us on line stepped in her way, insisting she was already sitting at that empty table.
In all my years of living in New York and abroad never before had a seen a mortal who was able to stand in line and sit at table at the same time. [Read more...]
27 December 2011 By 5 Comments
Dutch Designer Marcel Wanders Out-Geeked by Blanch & Shock at Galleria Illy
Only a fool tries to upstage Marcel Wanders by out-smiling, out-dressing, out-tanning, out-hairing or out-flirting the tall, dark and handsome Dutch designer. But were you to tie your hair in a bun, as Josh Pollen did, or hide your intense gaze behind protective goggles, as Mike Knowlden did, you might find it relatively easy to out-geek Wanders. These ingeniously inventive – and skinny – young chefs managed just that at the London launch for Flos of the beautiful Wanders Can-Can Lamp at the Galleria Illy pop-up this October.
28 November 2011 By Leave a Comment
Belgian Chef Viki Geunes Lays It All Out on The Table at Galleria Illy
“Spain,” Belgian chef Viki Geunes told a group of London foodies at the Galleria Illy, “is more technique and less product. Whatever I do must add value to the product.”
By evoking Spain the two-star Michelin chef at ‘t Zilte in Antwerp was asserting his opposition less to the contemporary cuisine of an entire nation than that of its most famous chef, Ferran Adrià. And by aligning himself instead with “the Nordic kitchen” and its obsession with exceptional vegetables from local producers and small farms he had one particular Nordic kitchen in mind, Rene Redzepi’s Noma. [Read more...]
26 September 2011 By 2 Comments
A Correlation Amongst the Quality of the Coffee, the Cookie & the Conversation
The reasonably safe premise behind my CoffeeSaturday pop-up series was that there would be a correlation between the quality of the coffee and that of the conversation. Nothing new there: For centuries coffee shops have cultivated an open exchange of ideas, knowledge and opinions both meaningful and meaningless. I nevertheless chose to sweeten the equation with a third element: the cookie. [Read more...]
5 September 2011 By Leave a Comment
Killing Time & Lovely Coffee at Monmouth Maltby St
One week ago I asserted that devouring a St John Bakery custard doughnut was the best thing to do on a Saturday morning in London. The food blogosphere disagreed: MiMi of Meemalee’s Kitchen said she could think of something else she’d rather be doing. Katrina The Gastronomical Me drew attention to a major oversight. [Read more...]
14 May 2011 By 1 Comment
The Imperceptible Greatness of Prufrock Coffee
One attribute that separates exacting chefs from merely attentive ones is an intolerance for the slightest imperfection. It is also a trait shared by kitchen tyrants who berate underlings for sprinkling 16 grains of coarse sea salt on the left half of a dish and only 15 on the right half.
Gwilym Davies & Jeremy Challender
The London-based baristas Jeremy Challender and Gwilym Davies, co-directors of Prufrock Coffee, possess the same perfectionism, if not the sadism sometimes associated with it. When asked what makes Davies, the 2009 World Barista Champion, special I refer to his habit of pulling beautiful espressos and then enumerating their minute faults. I’ve never found cause to send back a coffee prepared for me by Davies but he has. Twice he’s taken back my espresso before I’ve had a chance to sip it. You might conclude this was due to my having overestimated Davies’ skills as a coffee preparer or, more likely, his having overestimated mine as a coffee taster. But I think was more about fussiness and an uncompromising formula for greatness: 50 imperceptible adjustments = 1 big difference. [Read more...]
5 May 2011 By 3 Comments
Great Coffee in West London? Somebody Pinch Me.
Jeremy Challender and Gwilym Davies do not, as a general rule, wear £200 jeans but they seem to like pulling espressos in shops that sell them. The baristas behind Prufrock Coffee have parked an espresso machine just inside the shop window of Woodhouse, a designer menswear boutique at 189 Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill, West London (see map). Their other in-store espresso bar is in East London at the Shoreditch designer menswear boutique Present. [Read more...]
31 March 2011 By 5 Comments
