Home latte art: Coffee drinkers show their latte love with artistic creations
Posted by TheShot on 19 Aug 2008 | Tagged as: Add Milk, Home Brew
Today the Daily Herald (Chicago suburbs) republished a Wall Street Journal story (no subscription required!) covering the growing consumer interest in home latte art: Daily Herald | Coffee drinkers show their latte love with artistic creations. The article notably takes a San Francisco bias in its choices for interviewees. However, it properly cites the founder of Seattle’s Espresso Vivace, David Schomer, as the father of modern latte art.
The article also notes how coffee shops are now offering classes in creating latte art designs and how the latte artists themselves are organizing contests (events that have been around for some time, but with new, prosumer players). But while the article fusses over the prices of home espresso machine models, it makes no mention of the equally important role of a decent grinder.
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Last year we expressed how latte art is about as relevant to coffee quality as, say, bathroom towels are to a good restaurant meal. (Unlike Wikipedia, at least we don’t liken latte art to a nuclear holocaust.) So what resonated with us most in the article were closing comments from Chris Baca — barista at SF’s Ritual Coffee Roasters and winner of the 2008 Western Regional Barista Competition. The article cites Chris saying that he’s “tiring of latte-art buzz”: “It’s part of what we do, but we like to focus more on the coffee. You could have a drink that’s totally beautiful with the most amazing design – and tastes like garbage.”
Coincidentally (?), it’s this very emphasis on image over substance that has saturated the consumer market for home espresso machines with good looks and yet useless designs.
Don’t get us wrong: aesthetics do count. When my wife attended an advanced boot camp at the Culinary Institute of America (CIA) last month (her class was also written up in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, btw), the instructors made a big point about how you eat with all of your senses — and that you typically always start with the eyes. This is why all our ratings have Presentation scores.
But coffee as a medium for art almost as an ends to itself? When we really want to perfect our art at home, we’ll skip the rosettas and leave the coffee as a drinking medium. For a legitimate art medium, paper and charcoal or pen and ink wash still do just fine.
Video: Taking the concept of latte art to its next natural (and ridiculous) stage of evolution…
8 Comments »
on 19 Aug 2008 at 1:31 pm +00:00T 1.Mark said …
Erm.
Schomer isn’t the father of latte art. He himself learned it during a visit to Italy. He’ll also acknowledge people like Luigi Luppi were doing it and mastering it long before he was.
But Schomer is the person who brought Latte art to North America, no doubt about that.
on 19 Aug 2008 at 1:39 pm +00:00T 2.Mark said …
PS – read the original article – it’s much more filled out, with comments by the Hoff and others:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB121867495752039089-lMyQjAxMDI4MTE4MzYxNzM0Wj.html
on 19 Aug 2008 at 3:52 pm +00:00T 3.TheShot said …
Hey Mark — thanks for digging up the original article. We’ll see how long it stays up before WSJ requires a password.
I agree it would be ridiculous to credit Schomer as the father of latte art — as is also made clear in the cited article. But calling him the father of “modern latte art” (I think you may have overlooked our use of that modifer above) is probably not a big stretch.
The efforts of Modena’s Luigi Luppi not to be discounted, of course. But we can probably trace the rise of latte art education (training videos, books) and the popularization of latte art contests back to Schomer. (I’ve seen very little of their kind in Italy, however. So hopefully a North American bias is excusable here.)
Great references to Hoff’s absurd latte art challenge though. There is plenty of material with that idea.
on 21 Aug 2008 at 8:23 am +00:00T 4.TheShot said …
Speaking of some nice quotes from Mr. Schomer yesterday:
Starbucks no longer gives small coffee shops the jitters
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2008125785_indiecoffee20.html
on 23 Aug 2008 at 1:46 pm +00:00T 5.chris weaver said …
In my opinion thats a terrible analogy regarding the likeness of latte art, to a restaurant bathroom towel. A more apt analogy would be comparing a coffee shop bathroom towel to a restaurant bathroom towell.
Also more apt would be comparing the latte art in a coffee shop, to the presentation of food in a fine restaurant. If you go to to macdonalds they just dump it down in a cardboard container, however if they did this in a fine restaurant, you’d leave. Whilst it may not play any relation to the quality of the food directly. It does give an insight into the passion and effort put into the aforementioned food.
on 23 Aug 2008 at 10:34 pm +00:00T 6.TheShot said …
Thanks for the comments, Chris. We tried to make mention that restaurant plating is a virtue — to the extent that we do first consume things with the eyes (engaging all of our senses). But restaurant plating, by comparison, does not have contests and competitions anywhere near the degree we see with latte art.
As we mentioned previously, we’d take great microfoam anytime over any good latte art. If someone is to channel their passion and effort into the end product, hopefully it’s more than just the visual — and latte art is primarily about the visual. There are no sensory scores in latte art competitions, for example. And latte art arguably says more about milk than it does about coffee.
It’s for these reasons we’re sticking with the restaurant bathroom towels analogy.
on 24 Aug 2008 at 4:59 am +00:00T 7.chris weaver said …
Well I guess its good to stick to your guns.
However, whilst latte art may not be a be all and end all regarding the quality of the coffee.
Firsty, milk has to be well microfoamed to pour good latte art, secondly, the crema has to be thick, compact, and not overly bubbly, a sign of good crema.
Whilst I appreciate you can pour latte art with bad coffee, it would take a lot of experience that would come with a good barista, thus rather paradoxically the coffee wouldn’t be bad…
on 24 Aug 2008 at 8:02 am +00:00T 8.TheShot said …
No question that you can’t make latte art at all without the foundation of both a decent crema and decent microfoam. But that’s a pretty low bar for a latte art competition: i.e., the fact that it’s possible to create it at all.
If we could have a great cappuccino with a nice rosetta on it, you bet we would prefer that over something more plain. But the level of commitment and dedication going into just that element of it these days seems out of proportion for what is mostly just a clever schoolyard trick.