The craftsman behind the Carapina shops in Florence and Rome showcased stracciatella (“torn apart”) gelato, only it was stracciatella of another kind. This one was not a chocolate chip ice cream but rather one made with stracciatella di buffalo cheese –  a soft, ultra-creamy mozzarella variant made from the milk of water buffalo.

After his presentation I had the opportunity to meet Bonini and pose a few questions about using the best techniques and ingredients and avoiding the bad ones. What, I asked Bonini, was the biggest obstacle to high-quality gelato in Italy?

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.

Notes Music & Coffee is home to the UK’s first La Marzocco Strada, the Maserati of espresso machines. Sartori bakes its Neapolitan-styled pizzas in the wood-fired brick forno crafted by Strazzullo Michele, the Stradivarius of pizza ovens.

With its Strada platform La Marzocco introduces pressure profiling, a technology which allows the barista to customise espresso extraction to draw out certain flavour components and mute others. Ordinarily a barista would pull an espresso under a steady brew pressure of 9 bars for 25-30 seconds. With the Strada baristas can adjust the pressure as easily as a chef would the intensity of a burner.

Initially I dismissed pressure profiling as a gimmick and the Strada’s mechanical pressure paddle as nothing more than a play toy for baristas. (Sure I too wanted one in my bedroom, but that’s another story.) Notes Music & Coffee co-owner Fabio Ferreira changed my thinking in 60 seconds. He pulled two espressos for me using the same coffee blend – Has Bean’s Kicker – but changed their pressure profiles. He brewed the first shot under a pressure of 9 bars for the first 15 seconds and then lowered the pressure to 3 bars for the final 15 seconds. He brewed the second shot at 3 bars for the first 15 seconds, ramped up the pressure to 9 bars for an additional 10 seconds and then back down to 5 bars for the final 5 seconds.

The difference between the two was dramatic: The first shot delivered the lemon zing that puts the kick in Kicker. The second was sweeter and softer, likely the result, according to Ferreira, of the long, low-pressure “pre-infusion”. If any geek needed a rationale to spring for a gleaming new Strada, this was it.

The appeal of a Strazzullo Michele pizza oven, like that of a La Marzocco, can be as much about machismo as macchina. That the company’s made-to-order pizza ovens are now mostly exported to deep-pocketed clients in Japan, Korea, China and the USA only enhances their snob appeal back home in Naples. Thrilled merely to have Strazzullo Michele take its money, Sartori did not dictate such design details as the shape of oven’s benchtop or the colours and patterns of its decorative mosaic. Strazzullo Michele pretty much told Sartori how their Leicester Square oven was going to be.

The shiny, bright-coloured ceramic shell you see encasing the domes of brick ovens at famous pizzerias is missing. So, for that matter, is the dome – or at least the top of it. The low height and flattened roof of this model’s baking chamber enables even heat distribution and cooking. There’s little risk of incinerating the crust even before the mozzarella has melted and the dough has cooked through. Paolo, Sartori’s accomplished Neapolitan pizzaiolo, can liquify the fior di latte that floats over his exceptionally light Margherita without having to lift it up from the hot stone and suspend the pizza in the oven’s hottest reaches. The hot zones are everywhere.

Impressive as they are, the Strazzullo Michele pizza oven and La Marzocco Strada espresso machine depend on top-quality ingredients as well as the skill of the mano del operatore. At Notes Music & Coffee and Sartori the “operator’s hand” belongs to geeks who know enough to know there is always more to know.

Notes Music & Coffee, 31 St Martin’s Lane, London WC2N 4ER (map) – 020 7240 0424

Sartori, 15-18 Great Newport Street, London WC2H 7JE (map) – 020 7836 6308

Why has it been so difficult to pinpoint his whereabouts? For years now, Gwilym has not plied his craft in a coffee shop with a fixed address and fitted plumbing. That would be too restrictive for a free-spirit who lives in a houseboat. He developed his championship form working irregular hours at a freestanding cart parked at Whitecross Street food market (“Pitch 42”) on weekdays from 8ish to 2ish and behind the Columbia Road flower market on Sundays at roughly the same hours. His schedule was made more uncertain by his winning the World Barista Championship (WBC) in April 2009. A rock star in the coffee world, he’s invited to Italy so often he may have to change his name to Guglielmo. And now he’s rolled into Shoreditch with yet another cart. Prufrock, as the sleek and polished trolley is known but not labeled, is positioned inside the fashionable menswear shop Present (140 Shoreditch High Steet – see map).

With the cart at Present Gwiylm has rolled out the prized Nuova Simonelli piston espresso machine he won at the WBC. Piston espresso machines, unlike most pump-driven ones, are fitted with manual levers that need to be pulled down by the barista to build pressure and force hot water through the coffee grinds. The term “pulling” an espresso derives from this action.

The espressos, lattes and cappuccinos prepared with a piston machine are not necessary superior to those made with a pump machine. In fact, because these manual machines are so difficult to operate the results are often disappointing. Struggling to get his espresso and steamed milk the way he wanted and hoping to learn from his missteps Gwilym recorded all the variables of his failed attempts – dry weight, total time, liquid weight, etc – on a hand-written chart. This proved counterproductive. He is a coffee geek, sure enough, but not a charts and numbers coffee geek. “Stop thinking so hard,” advised his roaster, Annette Moldvaer of London’s Square Mile Coffee. “Just make a nice coffee.”

He listened and he did. Not every espresso is the same. One can be heavy and chocolatey; the next, lighter and fruitier. But it is this very mutability that I find most appealing. Whereas competition baristas like Gwilym are judged for the consistency of their drinks and presentation, at Present he and the star baristas who operate the Nuova Simonelli in his absence are embracing an inconsistency and imperfection dictated by a fiddly manual machine. Every result is a discovery; every cup, unique. The ultimate reward for Gwilym is found in the quiet of the piston machine. There is no electric pump making noise. For the first time he can hear his world champion espresso fall into the cup. At Present, you can hear it, too.