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 may at first seem a snore of a technical question unlikely to electrify the spectator stands. Indeed it was the efficiency and flair of this fluid barista from Intelligentsia Coffee in Chicago – and possibly also his white suspenders – that rocked the Olympia’s great steel and glass ceiling, not dry tales of wet processing. But with his bean-splitting challenge, Phillips was taking the most fundamental responsibility of a barista – brewing and serving a coffee to its best advantage – to a new level. And the judges, sadly the only ones in the arena who got to sample the espressos, cappuccinos and signature espresso drinks prepared in competition, were sufficiently impressed to award the USA its first World Barista Champion.

For his signature drink or, in his case, three signature drinks, Phillips chose three coffees from one terroir, the Coope Dopa Cooperative in Santa María de Dota, Tarrazú, Costa Rica. Same altitude, same microclimate, same bean varietals. The lone distinction? How three different farmers from a single cooperative chose to process these beans and how this in turn dictated subtle differences in the ways Phillips chose to roast, grind and dose them for espresso.

Three customised espressos inspired three exotic signature recipes, requiring Phillips to prepare an astonishing total of 12 glasses (three drinks for each of the tasting judges) in a short time frame. A daunting task to be sure, especially as the high level of difficulty in his program up to that point had already been lost on many in attendance, myself included. To grind the three coffees to their optimal fineness and therefore extraction, Phillips found himself one grinder short.

“He had to think outside the box”, barista Tim Styles of London’s Penny University explained to me. “He only had two grinders. So what did he do? He brought in an extra hopper.”

After his presentation in the finals I asked Phillips if he found it stressful to change grinder hoppers midway through a pressure-packed presentation performed while three technical judges poked their heads and clipboards in his tight workspace.

“Piece of cake”, responded Phillips, less with swagger than levity. Thing is it was a big deal. From close in I could see his hands trembling as he poured liquids into glasses. I could almost feel his exhales of relief when his time was up and attention turned to the Greek finalist Stefanos Domatiotis.

Changing coffees. Switching hoppers. Altering grinds. Adjusting doses. “Was all that necessary”?, I asked Phillips, minutes before the results were announced . “If that didn’t need to be done”, he reasoned “then they wouldn’t need me to do it”.

Spoken like a true barista.
podium (l to r): Scottie Callaghan, Australia, 3rd
Michael Phillips, USA, 1st
Raul Rodas, Guatemala, 2nd

With New York placing 6 of its restaurants in the top 50 and Paris 5, proud locals who were calling London the number one restaurant city only yesterday may have been having second thoughts this morning. I too found myself reassessing my position on the matter, only from the opposite perspective: last night was the first time since moving to London 5 years ago I felt inclined to place it above Paris and New York, my prior cities of residence, as the world’s gastronomic capital.

Could this be the reversal of a starstruck food obsessive gone gooey after breathing the same heady air as celebrated chefs René Redzepi and Grant Achatz, Ferran Adrià and Heston Blumenthal? Potentially, yes. Did I maybe drink one too many mugs of smoke-breathing Guildhall Punch chilled with dry ice at the Awards after party? Not that I remember.

Mostly I was moved by the great hospitality of London, not merely to this international gathering of elite chefs but, more significantly, to their ideas, their accomplishments, their influence.

After the awards I followed Adrià around, snapping photos and waiting for a moment alone with the master. When I got it I asked him through an interpreter what was required of the diner, what made a world’s best restaurant diner?

“They should enjoy themselves and,” replied Adrià, pausing for emphasis, “they must be open-minded”.

That, I thought afterwards, was London: unburdened by traditions set in soil and wide open to discovery, innovation and foreign influence. In the UK, unlike in France, gastronomic chauvinism, justified or not, is rooted in the freedom to look overseas and find what’s best, a glorious task the nation’s food enthusiasts share with the organisers and judges of the 50 Best. The bias for the new over the old is manifest.

Blumenthal denied this had been a rough night for the UK before revealing how delighted he was to see so many of his foreign chef friends, perhaps including a few selected at the expense of his overlooked British colleagues. The best thing about the awards, he said, was their expanding global reach. In his eyes the rankings, for all their subjectivity, were an accurate reflection of modern gastronomy and a new spirit of international exchange.

“15 to 20 years ago the great chefs of France would accuse each other of stealing ideas,” said Blumental. “They were very competitive.” Now if he wants to nick an idea he calls the chef behind it on the phone, as he did with Massimiliano Alajmo, a fellow top 20 chef (from Le Calandre in Padua) also inclined to do strange things like filling a syringe with ragu. (Remember the spag bol from In Search of Perfection on the BBC?)

End of the day, The S. Pellegrino World’s Best Restaurants 2010 is, as Achatz of Alinea, the highest-ranking US restaurant says, “a list”. What could executive chef Daniel Boulud have possibly done in the space of a year for his Daniel to climb from 41st best to 8th best restaurant in the world (apart from garnering a 3rd Michelin star)? Are there really 31 dining destinations on the planet superior to The French Laundry?

“You can’t put too much into it,” said Achatz, as if to warn himself not to get too high – or low. “You can’t hit yourself over the head about it.”

It was heartwarming to see Redzepi accepting his award with 7 members of his kitchen brigade, all of them wearing t-shirts bearing a photo of an 8th – Ali, a Gambian dishwasher who couldn’t get a visa and was left behind in Copenhagen.

“The statement is, we miss him,” said Redzepi, “It is a team. If you surround yourself with people you love anything is possible.”

Does this spirit of teamwork, I asked the unassuming heir to Adrià and Blumenthal, signal the downfall of the tyrant chef?

“I can be angry sometimes,” he replied. “It lasts 5 minutes. Nothing is worth putting yourself through that type of crazy fighting. This isn’t the Nobel Prize.”

Still, he conceded, winning the World’s Best Restaurant prize “wasn’t all that bad”.