New York City: Espresso’s New Wave Hits Town
Posted by TheShot on 13 Sep 2006 | Tagged as: Barista, Beans, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues, Roasting
New York City — that backwater of quality espresso that has long proven, if I may paraphrase Frank Sinatra, “If you can make decent espresso there, you can make it anywhere” — has reportedly been hit by a “wave” (here we go again) of better coffee. Or so says today’s New York Times: Espresso’s New Wave Hits Town – New York Times.
It’s nothing we haven’t exactly seen before. The article touches on a few of the better quality espresso shops now in New York. But it does offer a nice overview of what goes into bean selection, roasting, dosing, tamping, and pulling a quality shot.
Meanwhile, those wizards of semi-stale coffee put under strict quality controls, Illy, announced the opening of another month-long, temporary exhibit in New York called “Beauty Has A Taste“: Illy Introduces ‘BEAUTY HAS A TASTE’ an Exhibition in the Heart of New York City.
Beverage marketers must be spending a lot of time at conventions having pajama parties to talk about this recent fad of sponsoring temporary exhibits/installations. I hesitate at the prospect of subjecting myself to a walk-in infomercial. But if I was in New York during the next month, curiosity would still probably get the better of me. Afterall, I was lame enough to stumble into the Glenlivet City Links miniature golf- and scotch-themed (no, really) exhibit on a lunch break last February.
UPDATE: Oct. 25, 2008
Yesterday the New York Times essentially published a two-year update to this same article: Beyond Starbucks – Coffee Shops Overflow, but Will Connoisseurs Pay the Price? – NYTimes.com. The difference now being that there are more and more decent places to get espresso in this long-standing coffee wasteland. Even so, calling New York “Bean Town” now (as in the title of the article) is a bit of a stretch — considering that there are still more than three million residents for every great espresso purveyor in town.
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[...] On the other side of the divide, we have people who respond to the same news with incredulous disbelief and outright ridicule. When people whine about Starbucks’ announcement to raise prices a whopping $0.05 per cup, these folks shake their heads at the infamous “$4 cup of coffee at Starbucks” — even if you cannot buy a basic cup of coffee at Starbucks for that price. On this side of the divide, the appropriate response to news of coffee price hikes are articles about where to get the most dirt cheap cup of joe available (e.g., Five Places to Get Cheap Coffee – washingtonpost.com). To them, and to most New Yorkers, coffee is a basic consumable just this side of tap water with little differentiation other than price. [...]
[...] their recent opening of Espressamente Illy cafés across Europe and temporary exhibits such as “Beauty has a taste” in New York City — all primarily as advertisements for the Illy brand. It also touches on his [...]