Restaurant Coffee and the Intercontinental Divide?
Posted by TheShot on 26 Jul 2008 | Tagged as: Café Society, Restaurant Coffee
Foodie rag gone online, Saveur.com, recently published a series of coffee-themed articles in conjunction with the SCAA. One of the articles lamented American restaurants’ continued one-dimensional treatment of coffee: Nothing ‘Regular’ About It – Saveur.com.
“‘Regular’ coffee?! The appetizer alone rated five adjectives,” writes reporter Jim Munson. We’ve expressed this very same lament here a couple years ago. It’s preposterous to think of “wine” or “cheese” as singular, indiscriminate, sufficiently self-described substances on restaurant menus.
Given that American coffee palates have now had two whole decades to evolve beyond Maxwell House, and given that it has been almost 10 years since we first walked into a restaurant in Santa Barbara (unfortunately now closed) and were offered five different coffee varietals in French presses, what is the hold up?
And it’s not just coffee snobbery either. You can’t even walk into a supermarket today and buy basic “orange juice” without having to navigate 47 different options. Even something as straightforward as V8 juice now comes in a ridiculously confusing array of Low Sodium, Spicy Hot, High Fiber, Essential Antioxidants, and Calcium Enriched … not to mention V8 Splash, V8 Splash Smoothies, V8 V-Fusion and V-Fusion Light. (Please kill me now.)
The article goes on:
With the vast array of origins, blends and roasts now available, settling for a “regular” coffee is a little like asking for a generic bottle of “red” wine. Or, for your main course, maybe you’d like a nice plate of “meat”?
Too many restaurant coffee varieties down in Oz?
Meanwhile, earlier this week in Australia’s The Sydney Morning Herald, we noticed an opinion piece that lamented Australian restaurants’ paltry tea options in the face of many coffee choices: Coffee has spoiled the tea party – Heckler – Opinion – smh.com.au.
Yet most cafes and restaurants have menus with endless variations of coffee. You know the usual trendy drinks such as lattes, mugacino, cappuccino, espresso macchiato and cafe con leche. But where’s the tea? If you are lucky there will be one or two types listed at the bottom of the blackboard – usually English breakfast or Earl Grey.
The writer even goes on to offer “10 simple rules for eateries,” where #1 is: “Offer the same number of teas as you offer coffees. A minimum of 10 is acceptable.”
At first glance, I wondered if this reflected a level of coffee savviness in Australia that’s lacking in the U.S. However, I would hardly consider the writer’s list of “the usual trendy drinks” as anything more than variations in preparation methods, or simple variations of steamed milk, than coffee varietals per se.
This likely reflects a bit of coffee ignorance by the writer that may not be all that different from what we experience in the U.S. (Especially given that Australia’s coffee culture is almost exclusively focused on espresso.) Meanwhile, we’ve had more than our fill of ten-teas/one-kind-of-coffee restaurants here in S.F.
It’s not rocket science…
But whether Australia or the U.S., it’s not rocket science for a restaurant to offer interesting coffee varieties that adequately finish a memorable meal. Four months later, and I still think back to one of my favorite coffee experiences of a simple French press of Harens Old Tree Estate at Merriman’s on Hawaii’s Big Island. No $11,000 Clover required. No special staff training. Just a fresh supply of good coffee.
Merriman’s is a great restaurant, and yet I don’t remember the food nearly as much as the coffee. And at a $10 price tag, that French press was far more memorable than bottles of wine I’ve had at restaurants for five times the price.
4 Comments »
oh yes i think it’s only a small effort to offer more tea’s. At Caffenation we offer 40 (forty!) different coffee preparations and 40 tea’s. It happens a lot we have couples not sharing each others drink likings. So one picks a bag of tea the other orders an espresso or …
Of course 40 is a whole lot, but what do we need in a decent cafe for tea …
regular, earl grey, cammomile, linden, a couple of fruit infusions, strong black to drink with milk, jasmine, two or three sorts of green, fresh mint, chai, white and maybe a couple of clipper or yogi organic tea’s.
About the French press. It’s true it doesn’t have to be more than that. But it’s also true you need good fresh beans and grinded on demand, portion by portion.
Do we have a deal? : )
A big advantage of tea over coffee is that the turnover requirements on inventory — to maintain necessary freshness — are much lower with tea. This is certainly one of the obstacles for any establishment offering multiple kinds of coffee.
But given that many of these restaurants also offer multiple wines by the glass, which creates its own kind of small-quantity inventory problem (i.e., wine going stale in open bottles), I don’t see the inventory risk being that much worse for coffee.
I completely agree. I’ve had only one experience where I was given a real choice of coffees.
Because of an incredibly generous gift, I was able to eat at Alinea here in Chicago in January. Alinea is one of the best restaurants in the country (or so critics claim). It’s the only place that I’ve ever had a choice of coffee varietals. If memory serves, there were three single origin beans to choose from, served freshly roasted that day in a french press at the table. It was, and still is, the best cup of coffee I’ve ever had, but the meal for two cost $500 (again, paid almost exclusively by the gift; I have no such excess of cash), so I would expect a lot.
But, why do I have to pay $500 to get a choice of three coffee varietals? There are four great restuarants within walking distance of my apartment, with entrees around $20, but none of them offer any real selection. Two of them have automatic espresso bars, the others just serve drip.
By the way, that cup of coffee was the defining element of the meal. Any Joe can cook a perfect piece of wagu in a yuzu sauce and serve it with aromatic cedar branches. But I don’t know many people who can brew a perfect cup of coffee.
Interesting to know about Alinea’s coffee service. No question that Alinea, and chef Grant Achatz, are held in a regard as high as the prices there — even if it, and nearby Moto, are a bit of the “molecular gastronomy” thing (as much as chefs hate that tiresome term).
But talk about high prices. My wife and I had a reservation there last year that I had to cancel — simply because I was meeting up with an old friend (and restaurant fanatic), but I simply didn’t want to blow his future child’s college fund in the process of meeting up for a nice dinner together. (So we instead dined at the “cheap” Japonais Restaurant — located in the old Montgomery Ward HQ building where I once worked as a graphic designer in college, which was a bizarre experience for me.)
Good coffee really shouldn’t require a $500 meal. And when it’s done right, I’ve remembered it as much as anything on the menu.