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 tactic invariably backfires, bringing only pain and humiliation to the hapless predator.

Miles Kirby, the head-chef and co-patron of the London restaurant and coffee roastery Caravan, blames these calamitous mishaps on the consumer, not the corporation. “It’s the user who doesn’t get it right,”  insists the New Zealand expat.

He would say that. His two restaurants don’t merely serve their house-roasted coffees in cups made by Acme. Caravan is the UK distributor of Acme & Co., their New Zealand manufacturer. Jeff Kennedy, Acme’s creator as well as the New Zealand coffee pioneer behind first Cafe L’Affaire and now PREFAB, both in Wellington, is a friend.

Give Kennedy his do. Rather than scapegoat fumble-fingered customers he designed durable coffee cups with them very much in mind. If the Coyote dropped a filled Acme coffee cup from the top of the Shard (surely an act of intent given the secure hold provided by the wide loop handles) it would miss the Road Runner by a hair, bounce back up from the Tooley Street pavement and plonk the attempted murderer on the noggin. The steamed milk and rich espresso flung high into the London sky would fall back into the upright and undamaged cup, forming a swirly, two-toned likeness of a beep-beeping Road Runner on its surface. If the bruised Coyote finally captured something it would be the World Latte Art Championship.

To baristas and coffee shopkeepers, the added practical appeal of the Acme coffee cups is in their volumetrics – geekspeak for sizing. Eschewing generic measures or guesswork Acme’s cup sizes correspond to specific coffee drinks (flat white, cappuccino, latte, etc). Form follows function.

Acme’s white-rimmed saucers are interchangeable: The 145mm saucer fits three cup sizes – 150ml, 170ml and 190ml. There’s no worry about matching the right cup to the right saucer, an impossible task in the early morning when you’re pre-coffee and your eyes are half-shut.

The heavy-duty cups make a fashion statement, too. Actually it’s more of an anti-fashion fashion statement, the new law of  averages, that is to say, of looking average to set oneself apart. The branding is discreet; the effect, normcore (“normal” + “hardcore”). The almost generic design is about sameness, anonymity, functionality, simplicity.

Sure, Acme cups are available in groovy, midcentury hues of green, red and blue that can be matched or mixed. But it’s the dullest colours – brown, black and grey – that are most sought by indie coffee shops.

Brooklyn Coffee is a new minimalist coffee bar in London’s Shoreditch whose very name announces its hipster intentions. Its Acme coffee cups are white on the inside and the lip, as they all are, and white on the outside surfaces, too.

Caffeinating a trend where the best decoration is none, Acme’s white-on-white espresso cup and saucer might be the purest expression of a style whose appeal is plain as plain can be.

The Acme name comes full circle.

Acme cups and sauces can be purchased in the UK from Caravan and in Canada from Eight Ounce Coffee.

But Square Mile co-owner James Hoffman dropped the coffee geekery for our meeting at Bulldog Edition, as the Ace’s coffee shop is known.

James Hoffmann

The 2007 World Barista Champion didn’t explain how the baristas were using a state-of-the-art espresso machine, the La Marzocco Strada, to brew filter coffee.  He uttered not a word about his groovy new grinder, eschewing the new-toys routine so beloved by his peers. He didn’t enumerate the features that would make his coffee equal or superior to that served by Stumptown Coffee Roasters at the Ace Hotel coffee shops in Portland and New York .

Hoffmann preferred instead to preach his new coffee-shop gospel:

No preaching.

Bulldog Edition baristas must neither critique nor educate customers, unless prompted. (“If they haven’t asked a question,” Hoffmann tells them, “they haven’t opted into the lecture.”) Their job is not to give people their ultimate coffee experience but rather to give them only what they need right now – typically a cup of hot coffee with or without milk.

Backed by friendly and courteous service Hoffmann insists Bulldog Edition be, in his words, “a coffee shop that reliably makes your day better”.

 
A coffee shop that makes your day better. Hmmm, try rolling that one around your tongue.

It’s odd to get a dose of all-American happy talk from any Briton, much less from Hoffmann, the coffee expert who, through his personal blog and company blog, has taught us so much about the ins and outs of coffee. But behind this promise is an acknowledgement that not everyone likes being told what they should and shouldn’t like.

“Coffee”, he says, “has replaced wine as the pretentious idiot drink. We’ve become the butt of jokes.”

Bulldog Edition is only Square Mile’s second venture into retail. The first, Penny University, was a pop-up brew bar opened in Shoreditch in 2010. A puritanical shrine to filter coffee, Penny U deprived its disciples of milk and sugar. It was meant to educate and even provoke.

 

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 Espresso Base is transformed, as if by divine decree, into one of London’s most enchanted coffee sanctuaries.

It’s not too bad on rainy days either, although takeaway might then be the preferred option. The coffee, from the nearly infallible roaster Has Bean, is handled and brewed with care and quiet elegance by Di Mattia. There are superior London baristas and coffees shops, sure, but none with this glorious church designed by architect Nicholas Hawksmoor as their backdrop.

Espresso Base is a mere 443 feet from the British Museum (see map), a fact lost on 5.59999999 million of the 5.6 million visitors last year to the UK’s most popular cultural attraction. Coffee-loving, tourist-phobic Londoners might say this is most fortunate, a selfish view I would respond to with perhaps more sympathy than Di Mattia, his partner Vittorio Caberlotto or their creditors.

Such are my priorities when back home in New York: Family first, coffee close behind.

The story behind the zinger was the third big coffee exclusive entrusted to me by James Freeman, a coffee lunatic from Oakland, California who’s progressed from disaffected freelance musician to bi-coastal super-roaster of international renown. I don’t know what it is. I’ve never met Freeman face-to-face. I call him and he tells me things: The origin of the Gibraltar, San Francisco’s cult coffee. The inspiration behind the SG-120, a coffee in a glass of its own. The what, how and why of the zinger.

I raced up to the bar at Blue Bottle and asked the New York barista to make me a zinger. I don’t recall being smug about it.

– A zinger?

– Yes, a zinger. Ever made one?

– Never heard of it.

The zinger, I explained, was an insider’s iced coffee created by his Blue Bottle counterparts in San Francisco to achieve the effect of melted coffee ice cream in a small glass. They made their zingers by filling a Gibraltar glass halfway with cold-brewed, chicory-flavoured New Orleans ice coffee (see Blue Bottle’s recipe) and topping it with half and half (“half cream” in the UK) and a single ice cube. I boasted that I had learned of the zinger from none other Freeman, the boss of his boss.

– James Freeman?

The increasingly skeptical barista made eye contact with a colleague to check my story. The second barista made a face. It wasn’t a sympathetic face. He too knew nothing of the mysterious iced coffee.

At first they refused to make me a zinger for fear of the naughty things I might do with my photos and my suspect claims. But soon they relented if only to shut me up, half-filling a Gibraltar glass with New Orleans iced coffee and a single ice cube and leaving the rest to me. I slowly poured in the half-and-half but unfortunately there was no swirly effect, as there is when milk is added to Blue Bottle’s regular New Orleans ice coffee.

If somehow I hadn’t got the drink right I wasn’t going to let on. I took 73 photos of my zinger from several angles and then savoured the drink in a prolonged series of increasingly noisy sips. I needn’t have bothered. The baristas didn’t so much as look my way. By then they were 100 percent sure I hadn’t even met  Freeman and, maddeningly, they were 100 percent right. If they had no quick response to my zinger I had none to theirs.

In the age of triple ristrettos and double-shot flat whites the once beloved cappuccino has hit bottom, dismissed by coffee geeks as all froth and no substance. With the failure of Italy, espresso’s spiritual home, to catch onto the third wave of higher quality coffee it has sometimes seemed as if all of the trad capp’s once beloved bubbles have been popped.

Reviving the traditional cappuccino with quality espresso from the UK’s best roasters seemed like a stretch, figuratively and, given the milk texturing techniques, literally. That’s why in planning the 29 October CoffeeSaturday La Dolce Vita Pop-Up I sought support for the baristas Fabio Ferreira of Notes and Jeremy Challender of Prufrock.

Sue Aron, Chloe Callow and Ian James joined me in a Roman biscotti bakeoff. Sue, the creative force behind The Art of Puddings, baked pizza ebraica, which is not pizza as we know it but rather a distinctive biscuit from Rome’s Jewish quarter studded with nuts and fruits. Chloe The Faerietale Foodie and I both prepared tozzetti, the biscotti that is Rome’s answer to almond (or hazelnut) cantuccini. And Ian of Pie For Brains won the bake-off by the narrowest of margins with his take on brutti ma buoni (“ugly but good”), those impossibly light almond meringues.

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Guest of honour Katie Parla, creator of the new and indispensible Rome Dining App, provided an expert voice from the Eternal City. She’s my go-to source on all things edible and drinkable in Rome. Since I can’t always have Katie around I’m happy to have her app.

The La Dolce Vita pop-up concluded with a negroni pizza party. Pizzaiolo Herbie Leonelli of London’s great Datte Foco brought over Roman-style pizza al taglio.

So, yes, the 60-plus who signed up for this CoffeeSaturday pop-up did fall back in love with the traditional cappuccino. But, yes, the traditional cappuccino did have a lot of help.

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. The one and only way you could occupy both positions simultaneously would be by holding one of them with your coat. Usually it’s the coat that takes the chair. Were you to leave your coat on line most New Yorkers would just step over it.

The bored sophomore was still wearing her coat when she chased my wife from the open table. In taking possession of the table she identified herself as one of only two coffee drinkers within 50 miles who were unaware of the rule regarding such claims:

No coat, no table.

The other person unaware of the no-coat-no-table rule was my wife. Did I mention she’s English?

The bored sophomore and her bored sophomore friend took their coffees to the table and then got up to leave about a minute after they’d sat down.  First they steal the table away from my English wife, openly violating the first sacred rule of coffee shop etiquette. Then they have the audacity to get up and go in the time it takes your watch’s second hand to complete a single lap.

I’m sorry, I don’t care how bored a sophomore you are: if you break the no-coat-no-table rule to claim a table that’s not yours you must stay seated at that table for a minimum of 15 minutes. It’s the only decent thing to do. If you must get up sooner than that, say for a donut, you leave your coat on the chair.

No coat, no donut.

As the bored sophomores exited Joe’s my New Yorker’s instinct told me to follow them out onto Columbus Ave and yell at them in broad daylight, as Seinfeld co-creator Larry David or his alter ego, George Costanza, would. But I’m a London husband and father now. The calm and comfort of my family were paramount. I turned back and tossed my coat over one of the chairs at the vacated table, only it landed over another man’s coat.  A moment’s hesitation had cost us our second shot at the same table.

Trust me, I don’t seek out Seinfeldian moments when I return to New York. They find me.

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.

Josh Pollen and Mike Knowlden

The co-founders, with Amy Houston, of Blanch & Shock Food Design managed this feat not with smoke and mirrors but rather with smoking styrofoam boxes of liquid nitrogen, iSi siphons loaded with CO2 cartridges and four ingeniously experimental ephemeral edibles flavoured with illy espresso:

• Pain au Chocolat Nitro Ice Cream with Illy espresso
• Nitro Cappuccino
• Malt Coffee ‘Grounds’ in Filters with Cobnut Milk
• Nitro-Aerated Coffee Microwave Sponge with Brown Butter Sauce and Powder

Possessing the taste if not mouth feel of a buttery croissant marbled with the finest dark chocolate and medium espresso, the pain au chocolat ice cream was as much the day’s design revelation as the Wanders lights. Even so, it was the cone-shaped paper filters filled with malt espresso nibs that stole the show. Knowlden and Pollen prominently displayed their filters on a table beside the staircase, near the gallery entrance, and no one could resist them. It appeared as though the fabulously fashionable folks who’d filled the Galleria space beyond capacity were pouring individual containers of cream over coarsely ground illy coffee and eating the stuff with a spoon. They were delighted to discover that the coffee grinds were actually snacky nibbles and the cream, cobnut milk. Blanch & Shock’s imaginative food pun was a big hit.

Message to Marcel Wanders: Never try to out-cobnut Mike Knowlden or Josh Pollen.

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On the night of 28 November Knowlden, Pollen and Houston, three fast rising stars of the London food scene, made hay at my BurgerMonday pop-up. I mean that literally: They developed hay burger buns made with hay-infused roasted flour and reduced hay stock and slathered with smoked hay mayonnaise.

Admit it, London: There is no hope of any celebrity chef upstaging a geek in goggles, especially one whose sidekick has his hair in a bun, if smoked hay mayonnaise is part of the equation.

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. For his 15 September pop-up audience Geunes espoused a more grounded modern gastronomy, much as he does for diners every night at his new restaurant up on the ninth floor of The MAS – Museum aan de Stroom, overlooking the docks of Antwerp’s newly fashionable Eilandje district.

Geunes’ Galleria talk was improvised within the loosely structured hour it took him and his assistant Cindy Cuypers to assemble some 50 tasting samples of a new dessert composition created for the occasion. Appropriately, each was plated on a coffee cup saucer.

About halfway through his show-and-tell Geunes began to piece together a full-sized version of his chocolat au café aérien, crème nantais et baies d’argousier, only not on a serving dish. He assembled it beside the saucers, directly on the white tabletop.

The elements of the dessert translate loosely as follows:

• chocolat au café aérien – aerated coffee chocolate
• crème nantaise  – drained farmer’s cheese and cream cheese with lemon, vanilla, egg yolks, sugar & cream
• coulis de baies d’argousier – a sauce of anise muscat syrup and sea-buckthorns
• parfait de café au sésame – a frozen parfait of Illy espresso and sesame paste with beaten egg whites and  whipped cream
• crumble of almond, sugar, coffee and egg yolk
• chocolate chips made with Xanthan gum, agar, glucose and sugar

Beyond those mysterious red dots composed of sea-bruckthorn coulis, the revelation of this dessert, with its delicate crunches and ethereal creams, was how the pronounced acidity of those exotic berries countered both the fattiness of the cheese and the nuttiness of the crumble, the sesame and even the coffee. For Geunes the self-taught chef coffee isn’t only a drink in a cup, or a specific flavour. It’s a set of perfumes that can infuse a dessert, a fine olive oil or, by extension, a marinade for langoustines with a particular nutty, toasty or lightly bitter character. At ‘t Zilte he’s advancing coffee as a cooking ingredient by moving it backwards in the timeframe of a meal, from after-dinner note to dessert flavour to main-course infusion.

Following the demo many attendees returned for seconds of Geunes’s astonishing dessert ensemble. After an hour’s seduction a saucer-sized portion was barely adequate. The chef himself eyed the larger table version of the dessert with wonder and longing. He too seemed mystified by the splendid result, a constellation in coffee, chocolate, cheese and sea-buckthorn on a white sky.

I asked him if he might be inspired to serve out desserts in a similar manner at ‘t Zilte, as the chef Grant Achatz had famously done at Alinea in Chicago. Turns out he was having exactly the same thought. But much as was intrigued by the idea Geunes reluctantly conceded he wouldn’t be trying it any time soon. Forward-thinking diners in Chicago or London might be ready to eat dessert directly off their Michelin-starred tables but not yet their counterparts in Antwerp.

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.

 For the first CoffeeSaturday pop-up at Prufrock in May I organised a speculoos bake-off and tasting. For the 3 September pop-up at the enchanting new location of the London coffee shop Tapped & Packed I invited my talented friends Thomas Bonasera and Ian James to join me in a biscotti bake-off.  Tapped & Packed managing director Richard Lilley made it a four-way competition: Richard’s cranberry almond honey biscotti vs Tom’s spelt almond biscotti vs Ian’s pistachio cranberry almond biscotti vs my chocolate hazelnut biscotti.

To complement the cookies T&P baristas Sang Ho Park and Rob Dunne brewed El Salvador San Rafael Bourbon beans from the outstanding UK roaster Has Bean for cups of filter coffee, espressos or flat whites. The San Rafael’s chocolate and hazelnut notes seemed a good match for nutty biscotti and a perfect one for my chocolate hazelnut variety.

Or maybe not. My #ChocHazel biscotti finished last in the bake-off. Ian’s #PistCranOrange biscotti won the competition and Tom’s #SpeltAlmond biscotti were a close second. From these results it seems clear that CoffeeSaturday voters drew one of two conclusions: Either harmonious flavours work better than matching ones when pairing coffee and cookies or Ian, Tom and Richard’s biscotti were just better the mine.

They were right, I was wrong: The best thing to do on a Saturday morning is to devour a St John doughnut AND sip a Monmouth Coffee. The two sensations originate seconds apart. Monmouth’s roastery (map), entered on the Maltby Street side of same railway arches, is open to the public on Saturday’s from 9am to 2pm for savoring great coffee and killing sweet time. You can purchase beans, too.

You can be forgiven for thinking there ‘s cream inside a silky-smooth Monmouth latte, as there is in a St John doughnut. One way Monmouth leads the top 10 coffee shops in London is by using organic Jersey whole milk from Jeff Bowles in Somerset in its silky-smooth lattes. Their richness helps wean you off the custard doughnuts.