La Colombe Torrefaction in San Francisco
Posted by TheShot on 22 Sep 2007 | Tagged as: Beans, Local Brew, Restaurant Coffee, Roasting
La Colombe Torrefaction, a Philadelphia-based roaster that’s been something of an East Coast analog to Blue Bottle Coffee Company, has regularly received national recognition for the quality of their roasted coffee. But on the West Coast, La Colombe may as well be based out of Belgium; they’re largely unknown around these parts.
In an attempt to help remedy that, last year La Colombe set up a simple West Coast distribution office — just two-blocks from the Piccino Cafe in Dogpatch. From here they receive fresh shipments from their Philadelphia roaster about every two weeks and ship it out (via UPS) to various local restaurants and cafés in town and up and down the West Coast — from Los Angeles to Las Vegas and beyond.
Recently I was invited by Damien Pileggi of La Colombe to pay a visit to their humble SF office — to share stories and to taste some really good espresso. Damien previously worked in one of La Colombe’s Philadelphia cafés, and seven months ago he came out West to run their operations out of Dogpatch. (It’s pretty much a one-person operation.)
The Illinois St. office is a modest space consisting of a couple weeks of inventory of their various coffee lines — e.g., Nizza, for espresso, Corsica, for drip, and pod supplies for the restaurants and other retailers that insist upon it. Freshness, and hence inventory rotation, is of critical importance. And like all the other premier roasters in the area, they struggle with finding a place to showcase their coffee by preparing it to their own standards. This is perhaps the biggest piece missing from their West Coast presence.
With so many elite-yet-coffee-clueless restaurants in the area serving poor, copy-cat renditions of Equator Estate Coffee, I’m surprised that so few have caught on to the unique, distinctive coffee service proposition offered by the likes of La Colombe and Ecco Caffè (for example).
Of course, you can’t count on restaurants making good espresso. But competition for great espresso is a good thing. Hopefully someone will soon pick up La Colombe in the area and prepare it to its full potential.
UPDATE: Oct. 1, 2007
It’s been well over a week since I brought home some of La Colombe’s Nizza blend, and it’s held up amazingly well. There is a lot of coffee where freshness gets you most of the way there. Rarer are the roasts and blends that hold up well with time because they offer a richer flavor profile. In practice at least, the Nizza has produced a very generous crema with a creamy, well-rounded flavor and full mouthfeel. This is a coffee that shines if handled properly.
2 Comments »
on 30 Oct 2007 at 7:17 pm PT 1.Alex C said …
As a restaurant owner reading these posts about restaurants not knowing about coffee I see that amateurs know little about the restaurant business. It’s not that we don’t know a good cup of coffee and how to make one. It’s that patrons like you want to pay $4 max, think we are Starbucks and ask for every kind of milk possible, require that we train servers as barristas when they are busy serving you and the reason La Colombe has not caught on on the East is not because we are clueless — we know about them. Their customer service is non-existant.
on 30 Oct 2007 at 10:16 pm PT 2.TheShot said …
Well, you definitely convinced me about the “not knowing about coffee” part with your Starbucks reference. (Which does make me question if you know a good cup of coffee.
)
That said, there’s no question that the restaurant industry is a tough, fickle consumer, labor-cost-heavy, margin-driven business and I know squat about what it takes to run one that can stay in business. And if I were a restaurant owner, I would probably be doing prison time right now for attempting to strangle every customer that wants their double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato. And you could write multiple books on the sources of problems with espresso at restaurants in this country.
But given what restaurants are already attempting to do with wine, and even the lower-margin tea nowadays, the sad state of coffee in most (though not all) restaurants is no excuse. Restaurants in SF such as Bar Bambino disprove the myth that good espresso is incompatible with a successful restaurant business — let alone just about any restaurant in Portugal or Italy that puts the typical American restaurant espresso to shame.
Restaurateurs too often send home patrons with a bitter taste in their mouths after a pricey meal, and that probably has the most to do with the status quo: they can get by because they don’t see/experience a competitive disadvantage. It was the same scenario with American coffeehouses some 15 years ago, before the likes of Starbucks profitably showed the public that things could be different. Most restaurants lack any vision in this regard — eventhough the path has already been paved in other venues.
But I’ve come to appreciate the restaurant that clearly acknowledges what it is and is not — by, say, offering individual French presses of a good, local roaster and distancing themselves from any additional misplaced pomp or pretention.