Lose the froth: Turin’s best cafes
Posted by TheShot on 14 Nov 2009 | Tagged as: Add Milk, Café Society, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues
We’re rather shameless about our love for the espresso and cafés in Torino, Italy. So we could not pass on today’s travel article in The Guardian (UK): Lose the froth: Turin’s best cafes | Travel | The Guardian.
So why do we love the espresso and cafés in Torino so much? To start with: grand locations and a long cultural tradition dedicated to killer espresso. To quote the article:
Even more astonishing, however, especially if you’re used to the rip-off prices in England, a coffee at San Carlo (and just about everywhere else in Turin) costs a flat €1, be it an espresso, a cappuccino or anything in between. And by cappuccino I don’t mean a vaguely coffee-flavoured polystyrene bucket of milky froth from Starbucks and co. For one thing, the morning cappuccino comes in what in Britain is fast becoming a dainty relic of the past – a coffee cup, rather than a super-sized mug. For another, and no less radical, it tastes of coffee.
Also included in the piece are mentions of Caffè San Carlo, Caffè Torino, Neuv Caval’d Brôns, Baratti e Milano, and Caffè Mulassano.
2 Comments »
Starbucks uses polystyrene in Britain?
I read your excellent article on the paper version of the Guardian with pleasure because I love Turin’s cafes. Allow me, however, to make a couple of pedantic points: in Italy, cappuccino is not a coffee, and it is not served in coffee cups. A coffee cup is the tiny one in which an espresso is served (in Italy an ‘espresso’ is simply a caffe’ – in particular if you make it at home). It may be also worth pointing out that the optional (and little used) dusting of cocoa on the cappuccino is bitter cocoa, not the sweet version used in Britain which completely ruins the taste of the whole drink. The relatevely little milk used in cappuccino is not because you don’t want to drawn the taste of coffee in an ‘ocean of milk’. It is because if you want a lot of milk you’ll ask for a caffelatte:’latte’ in English, which to Italian minds is not more of a coffee than tea with milk is a type of milk in England. It is rather milk with some coffee – the size of an espresso; if you like less coffee, it becomes a latte macchiato, or ‘stained milk’. As soon as coffee has more than a touch of milk (caffe’ macchiato) it ceases to be coffee, and becomes another drink, with a completely different feel: whether most Italian would have caffelatte at home for breakfast, or cappuccino in a cafe’ (‘bar’), they would not have it after a meal.
Enjoy your caffe’/caffe’ macchiato/ caffe’ corretto/ cappuccino/caffelatte/latte macchiato.