If there's a lesson to be learned from the Looney Tunes Road Runner animated cartoons it's this:A-C-M-E spells doom. To help catch his elusive prey Wile E. Coyote keeps putting his faith in the latest contraption manufactured by the Acme Corporation. The...
News that the new Ace Hotel in London's Shoreditch would be setting up its resident coffee shop in collaboration with Square Mile Coffee Roasters brought expectations of groundbreaking brewing techniques, cutting-edge gadgetry and barista performance art. But...
With a gleaming white La Marzocco FB80 espresso machine for an altar and a pop-up tent for a canopy, barista Gennaro Di Mattia presides on hallowed ground. When the clouds open a path for the sun into the narrow churchyard beside St George's Bloomsbury, his humble...
Seconds after giving a long hello hug to my dear mother I raced to the Chelsea location of Blue Bottle Coffee, under the High Line at West 15th Street, to try my first zinger. Such are my priorities when back home in New York: Family first, coffee close behind. The...
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...
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...
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...
"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...
[oqeygallery id=20] 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...
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...
[oqeygallery id=6] 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...
[oqeygallery id=2] 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...
The one detail that caught my eye as I entered Prufrock, the first coffee shop operated by 2009 World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies that does not rest on wheels, was the tamper doorknobs. A tamper is the hand tool baristas use to pack ground coffee into an espresso...
Yesterday I was trudging through the snow drifts along London's Leather Lane on the quietest of Saturdays in this December of discontent when I came across this wondrous sign above the entrance of numbers 14-16:Â Department of Coffee and Social Affairs. Was I...
No one who knows Stockholm will be surprised I fell back in love with kaffe & kaka on a family visit there in October. But everyone who knows me will wonder how I fell out with the combo of coffee and cake in the first place. Coffee and cake are in my blood. My...
If real wizardry was what the people wanted, November's red carpets would have been diverted from the Harry Potter premiere at Odeon Leicester Square to a great new coffee shop on St Martin's Lane and a superb new pizzeria restaurant on Great Newport St. Notes Music...
Gwilym Davies has sworn off lattes and flat whites. The 2009 World Barista Champion has also removed cappuccinos and cortados from the menu of his Prufrock Coffee trolley at London's Present. Gibraltar, SG-120 and all the other groovy terms for an espresso with hot...
One shortcut to following the global coffee scene is to track the movements of Tim Styles, such is the Australian barista's knack for turning up at seminal shops at the right time. He's worked stints at Ray Cafe in Melbourne, Joe the Art of Coffee in New York, Flat...
The London cafenatic's Tour de France is a kilometre long, with no hills or turns from start to finish. It departs from look mum no hands, a garagehouse coffee shop at 49 Old St, and arrives at Rapha Cycle Club, a pop-up gallery, boutique and coffee bar at 146-148...
Behind the top-scoring performance of Michael Phillips in finals of the 2010 World Barista Championship, held on the 25th of June at London's Olympia Exhibition Centre, was a single idea: how can the processing of coffee beans influence a barista's calibrations? That...
It was past the morning rush and my pre-caffeinated eyes coasted halfway through the coffee menu at Blue Bottle Coffee 's new Brooklyn roastery before getting stuck onto a road barrier listed only as SG-120. I shifted my gaze into reverse, spotted the familiar...
"The British capital won't be a coffee capital," I wrote in April 2009, "until the taste for excessively milky coffees recedes and the best coffee shops look beyond espresso to filter- and siphon-brewed coffees. I'd also like to see more coffee shops sourcing and...
L'omino con i baffi – "the little man with the moustache" – is closing shop and leaving Italy, much to the consternation of both stovetop espresso and Italian design purists. To cut costs, Bialetti announced it would close its Moka Express production plant...
Stumptown Coffee Roasters, Ace Hotel, 18 West 29th Street, New York
The concept of a restaurant that roasts its own coffee beans would turn few heads in the capital of New Zealand. Wellington now counts more coffee roasters than surfing instructors amongst its population of 180,000. "Actually there are no good waves in Wellington,"...
As an amateur barista who's been through 7 home espresso machines in a dozen years I understand the appeal of a foolproof model that makes you the same beautiful espresso every day. With most semiautomatic machines you need to get the beans, grind, measure and tamping...
The technique used by Rome's renowned Caffè Sant'Eustachio to produce an astoundingly thick, foamy head of crema atop its signature Gran Caffè is a closely guarded secret. Screens on each side of the Astoria espresso machines block the view of nosey cafenatics seeking...
first espresso of the morning, Caffè Sant'Eustachio, Rome
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