On a return visit earlier this month I didn’t watch the clock. I focused instead on Dom, shadowing his slow movements, tuning out the backround noise of the pizzeria and tuning in to the vocals of Claudio Villa, the “little king” of Italian song, playing on the pizza maker’s small red boombox. If ever there was music to make – and wait for – pizza by, this was it!

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 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.

5 Napkin built its reputation as well as its growing fleet of burger brasseries – the fourth 5 Napkin opens in Boston in a month and a fifth in Miami Beach’s South Beach soon after – on chuck meat. Even so, the introspective D’Amico was thinking the unthinkable: chucking some of the chuck.

D’Amico was restless. A chef with a passion for exploring new ideas, he was having a difficult time savouring the success of repetition, doing the same thing over and over again.

So where do you go after a 5 Napkin Burger? A 6 Napkin Burger? No, D’Amico decided to break the monotony of chuck by adding new cuts into his mince (ground beef) mix. He was after a beefier, steakier burger.

How, I’ve often wondered, did the unsung neighborhood Irish pubs of New York turn out such outstanding chopped steak burgers?  They weren’t sourcing locally and expensively from New York-area butchers (Pat LaFrieda, David Schweid) now as famous as the hot restaurants they supply (Minetta Tavern, Spotted Pig, Ai Fiori). D’Amico suspects the pubs relied on unsellable and therefore cheap cuts and scraps dumped by the national meatpacking plants. Who knew this was the stuff that great burgers were made of?

D’Amico’s idea was to incorporate somewhat leaner scraps of sirloin and, though no longer a bargain, hanger steak (thick skirt in the UK, onglet in France) into his chuck. To keep the fat content of his burgers at a steady, 5-napkin-worthy 20 percent D’Amico asked Schweid to supply him with a fattier blend of chuck than usual.

On 11 February 2011 at 11:38 AM D’Amico served me one of the first prototypes.

This photo does not lie: D’Amico’s new burger was deep-flavoured, as intended, and hit the 6-napkin mark, even if this was unintended. Importantly, it was black, crusty and caramelized like a steak on the outside, despite the deep-pink interior. The high contrast in colour and texture reflected an ideal that has eluded some burger chefs in New York and many more beyond the city line. I’ve yet to find a Londoner who can get the rouge et noir effect just right.

Not all burgers have to be crusty. On the same trip I introduced myself to the bash style burger, accessorized with caramelized onions, bacon jam, pickles, American (yellow) cheese and special sauce, at the new gastro winepub (not my term) Burger & Barrel on the northern frontier of Manhattan’s SoHo. Forget napkins: For this baby they should equip you with a disposable raincoat. When you’re devouring this sponge of succulent beef you’re not too bothered if there’s not much of a crust.The B&B bash burger, for all its messy merits, was no New York chopped steak burger. For that you have to have the blackened surfaces of D’Amico’s prototype.

Will D’Amico risk disappointing his most loyal regulars by replacing his 100-percent chuck burgers with the final version of his new blend? Will he commission a UK counterpart of that blend when he brings 5 Napkin to London in July for my BurgerMonday pop-up? In both instances he’ll have to convince himself first and his untroubled partners second. For them the success of repetition is leaving only a sweet taste.

…in a place like this…

Yet when Hugue Dufour, the French-Canadian chef-proprietor of the M. Wells Diner in Queens, New York, asked me if I’d ordered his silky-smooth parsnip soup with the sautéed foie gras topper I was surprised anyone would regard this accessory as optional.

“On ne vit qu’un foie“, I replied, a play on the French expression on ne vit qu’une fois – “you only live once.” What I essentially said to Dufour was that “you only live one liver” (wasn’t that the original title of a James Bond film?) and so I would pay the $10 supplement so as not to squander the opportunity. I don’t know what he thought of my pun, but he did reward me with this…

Eat like a kid, dine like a prince.

I was fearful that 4food might get wind of my plans and obstruct or otherwise thwart the swarm, but co-founder Michael Shuman was non-confrontational. He offered to close off an entire level of the restaurant to accommodate us (and maybe also to cordon us off from other customers) and he also let me design a special Burger Monday beef burger. As toppings I chose pickle, manchego cheese, guacamole and chimichurri yucca all assembled on a brioche bun.

Ultimately my only worry, as this video makes plain, was that the BurgerMonday burger would be much more popular than Shuman imagined and 4food would not have enough chimichurri yucca on hand to satisfy all the flash mob BurgerMondiacs.

From feticismo to fettuccine

Comprising most of section “2” on the floor map above, Eataly’s dry pasta department is only slightly larger than your average Tesco Express mini-market. Five aisles are consecrated not just to Italian pasta but to Italian pasta made within the borders of Gragnano, a municipality in the province Naples and the region of Campania. The artisan producers of Gragnano first sought recognition from the European Union to protect the provenance of their prized pasta. Here at Eataly they seek to establish it as a status symbol as well an Italianissimo imperative. Forget Dolce and Gabbana: the designer DG stylish New Yorkers simply must have in their apartments is di Gragnano.
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Eataly didn’t need to sell me on the virtues of what my go-to sources on Italian cooking regard as the world’s best dry pasta. Were I any more excited by its endless assortment of Gragnano they’d have to empty a brown paper bag of Afeltra penne and fit it – the bag, not the penne – over my hyperventilating head. I did need to be sold on a producer, however, and it’s there, in its curatorial role, that Eataly falls short: There’s no effective way to choose among brands of varying value other than by comparing prices and packaging.

With three of my go-to sources – celebrity chefs Mario Batali and Lidia Bastianich and MasterChef (USA) judge Joe Bastianich – as partners in this enterprise and a fourth, the estimable Slow Food, acting as consultant I initially thought that quality assurance would be in the bag. But to make Eataly financially viable founder Oscar Farinetti had to set aside shelf space for deep-pocketed food companies, both Italian and American, and possibly ask moguls Mario, Lidia and Joe, the co-owners of Del Posto, the first Italian restaurant in New York to be awarded four stars by The New York Times since 1974, to set aside some of their personal preferences for small artisan producers. Mega-brands infiltrate the selection, right under Slow Food’s nose.

Yet if Eataly is occasionally turning slow food for a fast buck I don’t think that alone explains my ambivalence towards this spectacular addition to the New York foodscape. I fear my thoughts about this shopping and dining complex are shaded by a crisis in my own Italianissimo complex and, more to the point, my disillusionment with Italian coffee culture and style. These are topsy-turvy times and the beautiful is turning ugly: George Clooney is pitching Swiss espresso to the Italians and lending his image to three-story Nespresso billboards spoiling the postcard views of timeless piazze. Lavazza 1995 calendar girl Carla Bruni is married to a French president who, horror of horrors, wears shoe lifts. She tells mean lies about Michelle Obama. And the Italian-roasted espressos prepared at Eataly by uniformed baristas under the eyes of Maria Grazia Cucinotta are not nearly as good as the American ones prepared a few blocks north by tatooed retrosexual geeks in a coffee shop that goes by the less-than-Puccini-esque name of Stumptown.

Left: Carla Bruni for Lavazza. Right: Lizz Hudson for Stumptown

Do Luke Holden and Ben Conniff stuff too much fresh Maine lobster meat into the lobster rolls at their New York seafood eatery Luke’s Lobster? Judging from the photo above you’d have to say yes: 4 ounces (113 grams) of lobster chunks from 5 to 6 claws is simply too much meat to fit into a split-top bun.

But is stuffing too much lobster into a buttered and toasted roll an undesirable thing? Judging from the photo below you’d have to say no. They couldn’t overload this baby with mayonnaise even if they wanted to. Where would you put it?

His chosen name and equally groovy occupation notwithstanding, Styles (né Williams) has yet to win a following of barista groupies, if said species truly exists, perhaps because he won’t act the rockstar part. The only smashing down he cares to do is of barriers between the customer and the server. Elegant, perceptive and meticulous in his approach to coffee preparation and service, he, like Tobias Cockerill and Square Mile Coffee‘s James Hoffmann, his Penny University colleagues, is more a barista in the sommelier mould, minus the stuffiness. The soft-spoken Styles is macho deficient and he’s “totally okay with that”.

Next week Styles turns 29, which, in barista years, is the equivalent of 58. When he started in the biz it was so long ago he wasn’t even using the term barista yet. His job was that of “coffeemaker” at the Bratwurst Shop in Melbourne’s Queen Victoria Market, preparing 800-1000 barely drinkable coffees per day in a busy deli packed as tightly as, well, a bratwurst. Hemmed into the corner by the 130-kilo (287 lb) Korean man who worked beside him, Styles took to leaning on one foot and unwittingly kicking off the shoe from the other. At Penny University he’s worn tightly laced boots, rather than his preferred Vans or Cloggs, to control a tic he’s never managed to – sorry – kick.

The first great coffee of Styles’ life was prepared at Ray Cafe by barista Alex Anderson, who would later work in London at Flat White. Too intimidated to linger for long at what was then an ultra-cool bastion of Melbourne artists and musicians, Styles did not take his first sip of latte until he’d stepped outside. “I was blown away”, he recalls, adding that the surface of Anderson’s steamed milk “looked like white glass” (no bubbles).

Styles later landed a barista job at Ray Cafe and was blown away once more, this time “by how little I knew compared with what I thought I knew”. He stayed there for two years, working night jobs all the while, and, with more confidence than money to his name, travelled to London (via New York) in September 2006 without a return ticket. Upon clearing customs he took the tube from Heathrow to Piccadilly and walked to Flat White, a rite of passage for Antipodean arrivals.  “Flat White was the mecca for coffee”, he says. “No one touched them”. Styles stuck around Flat White for six months and paid close attention not only to the preparation of the coffee but also to the dynamics of the queue and customer involvement.

“Tim takes a huge amount of learning from each cafe experience”, notes Hoffmann, the co-patron of Penny University and the 2007 World Barista Champion. “He also has the wisdom to adapt his approach if the concept is very different to what he was doing before”.

Styles was increasingly intrigued by coffee shops which put the focus on their  baristas and let them take control of the experience. At the Intellgentsia coffee bar in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles he observed how each customer was effectively met at the front of the queue by a person with a portafilter in his hand and a grinder at the ready. Moving along the counter from right to left the customer enjoyed easy access and interaction with those preparing his or her order. At the Intelligentsia in Venice, where Styles worked as a consultant at the time of its opening, the bar was replaced by four stations where customers would have a one-to-one interface with a barista.

Penny University, with only six seats, two baristas and no espresso, slowed that interface to a drip. As the acoustic counterparts to heavy-metal espresso machines, the pour-over and siphon brewers freed the baristas and customers to converse with each other in relative calm.

Styles obsessed about the operational details that would allow Penny U baristas to take control of the situation and share their excitement about the coffees without talking down to customers. To take one example, small water glasses were chosen so that the baristas would be refilling them often and subtly reminding customers they were being looked after.

Prior to its opening Styles predicted Penny U would confront a walkout rate of about 30 percent. The English were not accustomed to drinking filter coffee in cafés and they surely never encountered any who refused their requests for sugar and milk. Londoners, he reasoned, were introspective and difficult, unlike the forward-thinking, open-minded free spirits of Venice.

He was wrong. The walkout rate was negligible. Among some 2000 served there were only four requests for milk. This time it was London that blew the one-shoed barista away.

Chefs on holiday are not so much sightseers as biteseers on a mission, combing the kitchens of Copenhagen or San Sebastian or Tokyo or Paris or – who knows? – Newcastle in search of inspiration, fresh ideas, foreign flavours old and new. That appeared to be Isaac McHale‘s purpose while in New York as a scout with both his future and that of his new employer, Elliot’s Borough Market, in mind. His traveler’s notebook carried  a hand-written list of must-try bars and restaurants in Manhattan and Williamsburg recommended to him by colleagues (see copies below).

So what did I, a food critic who covered the New York dining scene for 15 years with The Daily News, make of McHale’s list? Mainly that if this enormously gifted young chef followed his notes and learned his lessons well, one thing was certain: When Elliot’s opened this autumn you could be sure it would be doing killer margartias, caipirinhas and mojitos.