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.

 

 
 
The slideshow above contains images of three burgers each ordered medium-rare at Bukowski, an ambitious burger grill squeezed into a shipping container on the upper level of Boxpark in London’s Shoreditch.

 
The third burger was a replacement for the sent-back second, which, judged according to the burger doneness color strip below, was overcooked.

The name Bukowski slapped on its classic burger is perhaps an unfortunate one given the unpinkness of the three I ordered medium rare. The burger with the Hereford beef patty cooked in 50 shades of grey is called – you can’t make this up – “The Purist”.

For purists the problem is the wafer-thin platform made from the no-yeast dough owner-baker Lee Hollingworth flattens with a rolling pin and bakes for 30 seconds at 400°C (750°F).  There’s zero give, bend or compression to the crust, only crunch.

“I wouldn’t consider it pizza,” commented Mike Morroni. “(It’s) more a bread and topping creation.”

Others complain a pizza format nearly as light as a prawn cracker isn’t filling and, at £16, isn’t cheap. They’re right: Pound for pound it’s the priciest pizza in London.

Or maybe it’s not pizza at all, as the purists – especially those with a Neapolitan bent – maintain. If what Story Deli calls pizza is merely a flatbread then it doesn’t belong on any pizza listing, much less my London Top 10. I get that.

But if you recognise Hollingworth’s abstract creation as a pizza, which I did three years ago when I put it on a list now overdue for a reshuffling, and if you’ve praised it as the most remarkable pizza with the highest quality organic toppings in London and the first one you’d take a foodie friend from New York to try then a ranking no better than eighth is feeble and indefensible.

I demand a retraction and an apology. From me.

Story Deli‘s has relocated for the third time, to 123 Bethnal Green Road (just off Brick Lane), E2 7DG (map)

Same with burgers and meatloaf sandwiches: At their best I love them both. But give me a burger patty with the mealy, mushy consistency of moulded meatloaf and I’m transformed from young&foodish to young&moodish. How fortunate that no one saw this side of me when I, seated solo with no one to the left or right, tried the squashy Aberdeen Angus beef shin burger with foie gras and white truffle mayonnaise (£10.95) at the handsome Princess of Shoreditch pub in London. 

To guard his well being upon arriving in Great Britain the American expat must get accustomed to two phenomena:

1. Left-hand traffic
2. Meatloaf burgers

The impulse to feed bread crumbs, egg, onions, parsley and other assorted fillers and seasonings to burger mince (ground beef) is not unheard of in the USA, sadly, but rarely do you find leading chefs, prestigious cookery writers and, most significantly, experienced short-order grill cooks adulterating their burger recipes in said manner. In the UK you do. Sorry, guys, this is how you make meatloaf and meatballs, not burgers.

With burgers the better the beef the less crap you need to add to it. If you’ve sourced decent, fatty, coarsely ground beef the last thing you want is meat binders and stretchers to fill in its crevices, soak up its juices and mush its texture into a pâté. You shouldn’t need any seasonings other than salt and pepper, both sprinkled on at the last possible moment. And you probably don’t want to bury a good burger patty under chunky spaghetti sauce, as you might a slice of meatloaf or a meatball. Not even if you rebranded that sauce as plum tomato chutney, as the Princess of Shoreditch has done in a local dialect known as gastropub English.

Is it appropriate to tart up a workingman’s burger with the likes of foie gras and white truffle? Reasonable minds may disagree. I could have a four-hour argument with myself over the issue. But top a burger with foie gras and trufflle and then bury it all in chunky tomato sauce? Insanity. I can think of no surer way to complete the unwelcome transformation from Princess Burger to Prince Meatloaf.

Princess of Shoreditch,  76 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE

UPDATE: Penny University to pop down 30 July.

If you want to see a Londoner famous for his temperature control get a little hot and bothered, just tell James Hoffmann in the most noncommittal tone you can muster you thought one of his featured brews from Square Mile Coffee Roasters was “fine” or “okay”. Better still, tell the 2007 World Barista Champion that, upon reflection, you suppose his coffee shop in London’s Shoreditch, Penny University, “fills a hole”.

“Ambivalence,” says Hoffmann, “is a terrible thing”.

Conversely, saying you positively hate his prized Blackburn Estate coffee from Tanzania is likelier than not to make him smile and get his attention. A puritanical shrine to brewed coffee that deprives its would-be disciples of espresso, milk and sugar, Penny University is meant to provoke. And so Hoffmann will take a “definitely hate” over a “sort of like” any day, even if devotion and love are the rightful responses to this groundbreaking, unplugged, pop-up coffee shop.

Make no mistake, Penny U is a retail space built to showcase and sell coffees, Square Mile coffees to be precise. Fearing some might wrongly judge the quality of the coffees according to the expense of machinery used to brew them, equipment most can’t use at home, Hoffmann and his associate Tim Styles (above left), who runs the shop he helped design, have taken the low-tech route. They’ve eschewed £10,000 brewers in favour of three manual home brewers made by the Japanese glassware company Hario: the V60 paper-filtered pour-over, the TCA-Syphon (vacpot) and the woodneck cloth-filtered pour-over drip pot.

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By providing even water temperature and distribution for the proper measure of coffee grinds, these filter brewers help a barista produce a cup of great clarity and often sweetness that unmuddies the taster’s experience. For me, it’s easier to pick up the aroma and taste of hazelnuts in the Capao Chapada Diamantina from Brazil or red berry nuances in the Blackburn Estate than it would be in an espresso. You almost want to ask Hoffmann where he sourced the hazelnuts and strawberries, which is just the sort of naïve and deceptively simpleminded question he and Penny U baristas Styles and Tobias Cockerill crave.

Everything in the cup, notes Hoffmann, is “from the roasted seeds of coffee cherries. The spectrum of flavours when they’re ground and dissolved in hot water is unbelievable.”

I’m not giving up espresso and neither is Hoffmann.  But there’s no denying that as presented at Penny U the slow quiet of the pour-over and siphon brewing processes constitutes a spiritual retreat from the humming, hissing and clickety-clack of the typically frenetic espresso bar. Seated at the six-stool counter you find yourself possessing both the time and the inclination to ask Tim or Tobias about the coffee they’re methodically brewing for you. The baristas may be answering you but they’re talking to everyone in the shop. Soon you are exchanging thoughts with neighbours to your right and left. Conversation starts with coffee but strays easily away from it. That’s the coffeehouse experience.

You don’t need to spend much time studying Penny U to notice contradictions within its dogma. The coffee is said to be about the ingredient, not the brewer, yet the Hario coffee makers, on sale in the shop, are very nearly objects of worship. The results are said to be attainable at home, yet the care and precision of the accomplished baristas seems paramount – and irreplaceable. It’s a big part of the experience. Furthermore, the no-sugar policy is a great conceit. I rarely drink my coffee with sugar. I understand their wanting and even urging us to discover the character and natural sweetness of their coffees apart from – and uninfluenced by – the flavour of the sugar and, yes, the milk. But isn’t sugar dosage a coffee drinker’s prerogative? Shouldn’t he or she get to decide if a coffee roasted by Square Mile tastes better or worse with sugar ?

Hoffmann has good answers for these challenges and you may have a few of your own. Indeed you can’t very well have a “penny university”, as the estimated 400-500 coffeehouses of 17^th century London were known, without the certainty of a good debate. These haunts were so-nicknamed for the price of a coffee and the education that went with it.

An anonymous verse from that period went:

So great a Universitie, I think there ne’er was any

In which you may a Scholar be, for spending a penny

Penny University – 5 Redchurch Street, London EC 7DJ

The image I chose for the twitter profile of @burgermonday is a photograph of a burger that is both remarkable and British.

Why remarkable? Why British?

That yellow goop you see dipping down irresistibly from the sides of the Rivington Grill burger is not merely melted cheese. It’s Welsh rarebit – exceptional Welsh rarebit made with the highest quality Cheddar and bestowed with a wonderful nuttiness.

With the Cheddar and the umami-rich Worcestershire sauce in the rarebit sauce, chef Simon Wadham imparts a umami taste and a British identity to a nicely formed and optimally proportioned burger. (To see a rare version of the Rivington rarebit burger click here).

The Rivington luxury burger (£12.75 on the all-day bar menu) adds still more umami with rashers of bacon and tops off the production with a egg for good measure.

A burger at the Rivington isn’t what I would call greasy, but it is a truly OILy – “only in London” – experience and as good a place as any to begin the #burgermonday conversation.

28-30 Rivington Street, Shoreditch, EC2, 020 7729 7053

178 Greenwich High Road, Greenwich, SE10, 020 8293 9270

It got worse. They didn’t only bring memories of Italy with them; they carried spoils, too: Bottarga di tonno rosso from Marzamemi, Gerardo di Nola long spaghetti from Gragnano, Poggio di Bortolone extra virgin olive oil from the Chiramonte Gulfi winery of the same name.  The first thing one of our house guests did after setting down his bags was commandeer our kitchen and toss together a large bowl of spaghetti alla bottarga con limone e prezzemolo.

As I ate his maddeningly impeccable pasta I chewed over my London EATinerary:

St. John Bread and Wine
Present (coffee from World Barista Champion Gwilym Davies)
Monmouth Coffee (Borough Market)
Kappacasein (toasted cheese sandwich)
Tayyabs
De Gustibus Borough Market (salt beef)
Dock Kitchen
Petersham Nurseries

Each outing began with a steep climb from our temporary home in Crouch End to the Highgate tube station. Charming as this leafy stretch may be in its autumnal splendor, the 20-minute hike was no stroll through the Piedmontese vineyards. If my friends wanted to burn their quadriceps and destroy their knees I’m sure they would have chosen to do so while in the bucolic hills of Langhe and Monferrato. The white truffles of Alba do wonders for ruptured tendons. Moreover, it was difficult for them to enjoy their walks in this deceptively calm area of North London given the clear and present danger of being run off the pavement at any moment by a Bugaboo buggy or a Micro kick scooter.

They made it safely to the first 4 stops on my food tour without incident. Their luck changed at Tayyabs, where the queue inside the dining room moved at the pace of a glacier – that is to say, a glacier prior to the era of global warming. A more benevolent Tayyabs would hand out naan noshes and toothpick-skewered sheekh kebabs to ease the long wait. Instead they torture you for 90 minutes by parading sizzling platters of succulent kebabs and lamb chops within inches of your nostrils at 10-second intervals. The dizzying aroma from the Punjabi spice mix is so potent it could be used in place of smelling salts to revive any Tayyabs waiters knocked unconscious by the fists of the victims left to starve on the endless queue.

The Friday night journey to Dock Kitchen, beside the Grand Union Canal in Ladbroke Grove, took 1 hour 50 minutes – over 30 minutes longer than the London Journey Planner estimate. Suffice to say that if you are going to travel nearly two hours to a Grand Canal you want it to be the one in Venice. That schlep, however, was no more bothersome than a November breeze when compared to our Saturday expedition to Richmond’s Petersham Nurseries. We left the house at 11am for a 12:30 lunch booking and arrived at 1:40pm. Royal Mail would have delivered us to our destination more quickly than the District line.

Steven Biondolillo is a respected marketing consultant who should be famous for his radius restaurant-rating system. Instead of using stars or point scales to evaluate restaurants he scores them according to the distance you would be willing to travel to dine there. Under his radius system, elBulli might rate a 5,000 to indicate a radius of 5,000 miles within which the restaurant would be worth a detour. A sympathetic critic might award Subway sandwich shop a score of 0.00000013.

For London purposes the Biondolillo radius system needs to be revised. The journey from front door to first course must be measured in minutes, not miles. And so, if Petersham Farms, described by these two ultimately delighted Californians as “Chez Panisse in the English countryside”, merits a journey of 160 minutes, then award it a rating of 160.

Judged solely by my friends’ comments I have critiqued the London food tour as follows:

St. John Bread and Wine – 90 minutes
Present – 30 minutes
Monmouth – 30 minutes
Kappacasein – 40 minutes
Tayyabs – 60 minutes
De Gustibus – 20 minutes
Dock Kitchen – 30 minutes
Petersham Nurseries – 160 minutes

Of course it’s possible we appreciate things more when we experience great difficulties beforehand. The French have an expression for it: après l’effort le réconfort – “after effort comes comfort.” Sounds to me like a great poster slogan for Transport for London.

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.

Could the great lyricist Johnny Mercer have had pizza in mind when he matched these lines about love’s uncertainties to a Hoagy Carmichael melody?  The fatalism in the song How Little We Know reflects my own doubts ever since I fell madly in love, almost nine hours ago, with the pizza at Pizza East, a two-day-old restaurant in the Tea Building (56 Shoreditch High Street, London – see map. Tel 020 7729 1888).

Lunching in a near empty venue where the staff outnumbered the customers by a ratio of perhaps 15-to-1, my Margherita pizza (£6) was the best I’ve ever had in London. It was more distinctive, stylistically, than the pizzas at all but one of London’s more accomplished pizzerias, Story Deli. Rather than merely emulate the Neapolitans, Australian chef Bernie Plaisted has looked to pizzerias in Sydney and Los Angeles for some crisp thinking. His pizza is crisp to the core, unlike its soft-centered counterparts in Naples, yet extremely light, airy and delicately chewy. Evidence suggests that the charred, blistered and bubbly cornicione (puffy outer rim) was inspired by the sourdough crust at Pizzeria Mozza in LA. It compresses exquisitely to the chew. The English difference entails dusting the dough with fine Maldon sea salt. It the pizza too salty? Maybe. Would I like them to use less salt? No. The Maldon almost becomes a flavour as much as a seasoning. I love it.

The mozzarella is Mozzarella di Bufala Campana DOP – the best that GBP can buy. Pizza East drains the cheese, as it must, only not excessively so. The scattered patches of cheese do melt and ooze some as the pizza bakes in the wood-and-gas-fired oven, but the transformation from solid state towards a liquid one does not turn the whole disk into one milky mess. Devotees of Franco Manca pizzeria at Brixton Market take notice: the surface geology of a Margherita requires molten masses of mozzarella floating alongside fresh basil atop a shallow pool of sweet roma tomatoes over a lunar-like landing. If the cheese is dry, chewy, stringy, tough or otherwise detached from those other elements the ensemble suffers. (I appreciate that Franca Manca’s Giuseppe Mascoli can not afford to use such an expensive cheese given his incredibly low prices. But it would be nice to have the option to pay a couple of pounds more for something better.)

My second pizza at today’s lunch was an extraordinary vongole variation (£12) topped with clams, oregano, cherry tomatoes, garlic, red chili flakes, butter and, most controversially, grated pecorino. This violation of the no-cheese-with-seafood mandate was immediately overshadowed by the defiance of not so much a rule as an unspoken trust assuring all, regardless of age, race, religion, nationality, sexual orientation or economic standing, that every pizza topping be edible if not palatable. Pizza East baked the vongole pizza with the clams left in their shells and then served the it that way. I could understand their removing the clams from the shells after the pizza had been baked but couldn’t fathom their leaving this chore in my hands. This would only slow me down when speed was of the essence. From my experience eating clam pizzas at Frank Pepe’s in New Haven, Connecticut I’d learned that no pizza variety loses more of its appeal as it cools and dries. And that’s why leaving the clams in their shells is such a clever bit of total insanity. It keeps them warmer longer, in their broth. (Some entrepreneur, maybe a Dragons’ Den aspirant, should invent a pizza-sized clam shell to replace the thermo insulated pouches now used by pizzerias for home delivery.)

So why am I concerned that Pizza Love will burst my bubble? First, hands-on consultant Bryant Ng, who was chef de cuisine at LA’s Mozza and has overseen the development of the Pizza East pizzas, leaves after dinner service on Monday – day 4. Plaisted, a capable and serious chef who cares about the quality and compatibility of his ingredients, may be able to manage for awhile without Ng at his side. But will his brigade of freshly trained pizzaiolos be able to maintain the high standards as word spreads and this ground-level warehouse fills up with Shoreditch trendhounds? And can they avoid cornicione creep – the infringement of the bubbly crust towards the middle of the smallish pizzas?
These are open questions that even Nick Jones of the Soho House Group, the backer of this venture, may not be able answer. For now I must take comfort in Johnny Mercer’s wise words of resignation:

Maybe it’s just for a day
Love is as changeable as the weather
And after all, how little we know