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.

“Actually there are no good waves in Wellington,” says chef Miles Kirby (at right in photo), co-owner of Caravan, a new restaurant roastery on London’s Exmouth Market.

“Bit cold in Wellington for surfing,” adds Chris Ammermann, Kirby’s partner and fellow expat.

Who knew?

Perhaps thwarted in their search for surging breakers between the banks of the Thames, Kirby and Ammermann have caught another kind of Antipodean-ridden wave – the third wave of coffee in London. They’ve installed a 10-kilo coffee roaster in the basement of Caravan, making it the first restaurant in the UK to also practice trade as a coffee roaster, shop, retailer and wholesaler.

Caravan has already made world-class coffee connections. Kirby and Ammermann source their green coffee beans from Mercanta, a leading importer of speciality coffee, and rely on a champion-calibre barista to extract their most desirable characteristics. Caravan’s coffees, once roasted and rested, are brewed in-house on Tuesdays, Wednesday and Thursdays by 2010 UK Latte Art Champion Neil Le Bihan of Exchange Coffee.

Kirby’s approach to both food and coffee is global. As chef or roaster he’d never limit his inspiration to a single continent. His favourite coffee of the moment is the Rwandan Musasa Cooperative (red bourbon varietal). Its tropical fruitiness informs Caravan’s Brazilian-anchored espresso blend (and Le Bihan’s hanging tulip latte) yet is best appreciated on its own, as filter coffee slowly cooling in its cup. The flavours evolve.

From late morning through lunch, the Caravan coffee experience is influenced by greasy, smokey fumes blowing into the restaurant from the sausage stand directly out front on Exmouth Market. Kirby and Ammermann applaud the improvised fusion. Downstairs, another unplanned mingling of cooking vapours is taking place. Air currents push the exhaust from the coffee roaster back towards the kitchen and its sizzling frying pans.

How would Kirby feel if his cooking oils absorbed the roasting fumes, imparting coffee notes to falafel and soft-shell crab as they fried?

“If it happens,” responds Kirby, philosophically, “great!”