Trip Report: Caffè Amici Espresso @ Montgomery St.
Posted by TheShot on 04 May 2006 | Tagged as: Local Brew
This is the sister café to the one on 15th Street in Potrero Hill by the same name. It just barely opened this week on the former site of a shut down Torrefazione Italia. It’s so new, the cash register wasn’t working when I visited, and the staff were making receipts with pencil and paper.
Inside, this café retained the same layout and many of the same features as the former “TI” on this site. There are five small indoor tables — and two outdoors along the sidewalk in the building shade, with displayed bags of Caffè Umbria beans and Deruta kettles.
One change from TI is that they replaced their dual two-group Elektra machines with dueling two-group La Spaziale machines. They serve espresso with a rich, darker brown crema that’s somewhat thick and definitely persists. Impressive given their limited investments in equipment. Flavorwise, it has an almost tangy, pungent taste of clove, hints of pine, and a small bit of pipe tobacco. Also like TI, they serve espresso in hand-painted Deruta cups — though here with Caffè Amici branding.
So far, the replacements at former Torrefazione Italia locations have been a mixed bag of both good and bad. But this is a surprisingly good newcomer to the downtown area.
1 Comment »
on 04 Jun 2007 at 8:46 pm -05:00T 1.Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com » Once feisty Coffee People whipped into Starbucks said …
[...] This is a nearly identical fate that befell the once-grand Torrefazione Italia chain. In 1998, it too was acquired by a larger conglomerate, Seattle’s Best Coffee, and then proceeded to go down the tubes in terms of coffee quality, the skill level of staff, and even the amenities for customers. Then Starbucks bought the lot, dropping the quality even further into the gutter. Torrefazione Italia was almost unrecognizable before Starbucks finally rebranded them with the green mermaid and Pottery Barn CD collections (or closed them down entirely). [...]