Trip Report: ZombieRunner (Palo Alto, CA)
Posted by TheShot on 21 Jan 2009 | Tagged as: Barista, Foreign Brew, Roasting
You have got to be kidding us. A runner’s supply store with outstanding espresso — perhaps the best in town? You bet. And a big thanks to veteran San Jose Coffee Geek, Gary Hutchison, for publicizing this unusual discovery.
This place ran as an online-only store for several years before opening this physical location in the old Fine Arts theater in the Fall of 2008. Walk past the aisles of Lycra, and in the back by the running shoes, you’ll find a small espresso bar run by serious espresso enthusiasts.
They use beans from the small and local Moksha Coffee Roasting, who roasts beans for them around four times per week. The barista here (Don, ZombieRunner’s co-owner) is very deliberate. We ordered the first shot of the day, and he took his time working out several shots just to make sure he got it right.
Using a two-group Rancilio HX machine, he employed what’s known as the “Weiss Distribution Technique” — which is an overly fancy term for stirring grounds with a stick, held steady inside the portafilter basket with a hollowed out yogurt cup, to ensure the evenness of an extracted espresso shot.
Don pulls careful espresso shots with a highly textured, mottled medium and dark brown crema: it has the dark colors and red speckling you expect from espresso done right. The crema is also rather full and thick, and it makes a shot that’s a true emulsion between liquid and solids. It has a potent aroma, a firm-but-not-heavy body, and a robust flavor of cloves and herbal pungency with some tobacco notes. There isn’t much sweetness in the shot, but it’s done so well you don’t miss it much.
They serve it in a double-walled Bodum glass — with an aperitif glass of sparkling water on the side. Great stuff. ZombieRunner is more than just a convenient place for good espresso; this is definitely worth the trip as an espresso destination. A new vacuum pot has also arrived for other brewing options.
Read the review of ZombieRunner.
3 Comments »
on 22 Jan 2009 at 8:04 pm +00:00T 1.Piccolo Jack said …
Just a quick note to thank you for the Peninsula search. Working in the Menlo Park the past few years, I’ve found myself taking the long hike to Cupertino to Barefoot. At that point, I could’ve driven back up to the city! In either case, I’d like to throw Califia on your radar. This is Charlie Ayers new place and he is using Barefoot beans. Plus he’s got the right equipment with both a Clover and Marzocco.
on 23 Jan 2009 at 9:37 am +00:00T 2.TheShot said …
Excellent. We love reader recommendations. And this one is just a few blocks from ZombieRunner. It will definitely make our short-list, as we hope to be back down there again soon. (Oddly not because I used to live in Palo Alto’s Barron Park neighborhood in the early 90’s, about a mile south of there.)
Charlie’s rise to prominence vis-à -vis his experience as a corporate chef is quite an unusual path. (Q: How many of us would have heard of him if he instead ran the Intel cafeteria?) But regardless of how much you think his qualifications merit his notoriety above so many other chefs working in relative obscurity, we do appreciate what the guy believes in. Even if the title of his new book, Food 2.0, warrants a firing squad of groans and rolling eyes.
on 03 Oct 2009 at 11:22 pm +00:00T 3.Zombie Runner « Man Seeking Coffee said …
[...] that I never would have stumbled upon without the help of Gary’s bloodhound-like nose and Greg’s careful advanced [...]