America will never make good restaurant coffee
Posted by TheShot on 03 Apr 2011 | Tagged as: Barista, Café Society, Quality Issues, Restaurant Coffee
We’ve been lamenting the sorry state of restaurant coffee in these pages since 2005. But let it be known that, as of this moment forward, we have officially given up on the possibility of ever being reliably served good coffee in American restaurants.
Sure, there have been a few successes and battles won along the way. There has even been the occasional restaurant that made us think about what’s possible. But reliably good coffee — the way you can safely expect at any restaurant in, say, Portugal — is a pipe dream. We’ve finally come to the stark realization that the war is effectively unwinnable … a lost cause. To deny this is to blindly ignore an overwhelming display of evidence.
Oddly, the bit of news that finally killed the dream for us — what finally broke the camel’s back — was a post in the New York Times about Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine five-volume encyclopedia set and Mark Prince’s review of its coffee chapter on CoffeeGeek.com. We’ll explain in a moment.
Restaurants’ running coffee joke
Bad restaurant coffee has been the norm long, long before many of us were even born. There are even front-page references to this topic in the San Francisco Chronicle going back to 1963. Among long-anticipated social revolutions that ain’t never gonna happen, this places reliably good restaurant coffee somewhere between professional soccer making it big in the U.S. and the coming of the Jewish Messiah.
So what about those two articles triggered such absolute futility about restaurant coffee? Both pieces were written with a kind of presumptuous expectation that quality coffee somehow deserves a place in the discussion of “modernist cuisine.” As much as we love coffee, the idea is both audacious and completely misplaced. Located in Volume 4 of the series (“Ingredients and Preparation”), the coffee chapter follows a roughly equivalent chapter on wine. And that’s where the comparisons begin to fall apart.
When wine, beer, cheese, and even salt have a lot more to do with cuisine than coffee
It is not even a question that coffee is far less relevant to cuisine than wine. Coffee may have far more aromatic and flavor components than wine, but it can never be paired to complement food the way wine can. The world is steeped with centuries-old culinary traditions of pairing local wines with the food of the region. And yet in the many centuries that coffee cultures have had to pair coffee with cuisine, to this date the combination simply does not exist the world over — despite the many failed, recent attempts to shoehorn them together. This is not by accident.
Beer pairings, for example, are far more relevant to cuisine; we received no fewer than two beer pairings as part of a recent tasting menu at Atelier Crenn. And yet there’s no beer chapter in Modernist Cuisine. The same is even true for the modern phenomenon of pairing food with different varieties of salt. Thus this leaves coffee no more relevant and integral to the science of actual cuisine than, say, tea, after-dinner cordials, or even cigars or tobacco. None of which either have chapters in Modernist Cuisine, by the way.
We can make all sorts of excuses about the coffee in restaurants — such as how the “last mile” in the serving chain for coffee is far more technical and sensitive than that for serving tea or wine. But even if you solve that last mile problem, that doesn’t change coffee’s very limited relevance to cuisine overall. And the less relevant coffee is to cuisine, the less relevant good coffee becomes to the overall restaurant experience.
And the award for best supporting culinary actor again goes to … wine!
This might come as a slap in the face to a number of coffee professionals who are riding a revolutionary wave in coffee consumerism. (Note that we deliberately didn’t call it a revolution in coffee.) In the past decade, some have even envisioned the role of the barista on the same pedestal that food television bestows upon celebrity chefs — or at least the expectation of rivaling the wine sommelier.
This belief is fed by a steady stream of people selling coffee technology and pitching media stories inspired by the major changes in coffee consumerism. All of which has given modern coffee a little bit of an egotistical head case — an occasional sense of entitlement to a rightful place in the pantheon of restaurant gods alongside pedestals for wine pairings, cheese courses, and dessert menus.
But baristas aren’t at all like chefs, and that’s a good thing. (If anything, they’re a bit more like line cooks.) Baristas aren’t like sommeliers either, and that’s also probably a good thing. Specialization exists in a modern society for good reason: we don’t want our mixologists making our pork belly, and we really don’t want waiters and host/esses pulling our espresso shots. And just as head chefs rely on sommeliers and pastry chefs, we honestly don’t want our chefs obsessing over our coffee service.
Either play by coffee’s rules, or we don’t play at all
The SCAA conference’s “Culinary Track” is one of the better examples of how distorted the coffee industry views itself within the culinary world’s hierarchy of needs. The SCAA might partner with the Texas Restaurant Association for its annual conference in Houston at the end of this month, but it is still as if the SCAA expects Mohammad to come to the mountain — not the other way around (i.e., establishing a coffee track at a restaurateur conference, such as done at Fancy Food shows).
For each annual industry conference for tea, aperitifs, cordials, cheese, and salumi, does the SCAA expect that restaurateurs will take time out from their relentless schedules to attend a restaurateur-dedicated culinary track at each of these events? Is coffee so egotistical as to believe that it is entitled to a role more prominent than any of its sister components to an overall restaurant meal?
The future fate of restaurant coffee
CoffeeGeek’s legendary Mark Prince may have gotten excited by reading Modernist Cuisine‘s slagging of restaurant coffee standards, but there is absolutely nothing modern about this phenomenon. General consumer standards for coffee may have improved over the past decade, but restaurants on this continent are forever doomed to be laggards for the reasons outlined above. It’s a pattern that has persisted for decades.
Why it has taken us this long to write off restaurant coffee as a second-class culinary citizen is a bit of a mystery. But like everyone else, it’s time to get over it. Reliably good restaurant coffee will never happen. Not in our lifetimes. And probably not ever. And the sooner we can stop pretending that coffee is some elite offshoot of the culinary arts, the better.
9 Comments »
Hmm, I’m still a little bit confused, Greg. I also read the coffeegeek’s article, and the interview with the author of Modernist Cuisine (MC) about the coffee chapter prior to the publication.
What I read is that the author is enthusiastic about coffee after he interviewed a lot of people in the industry. So the chapter which first was designed to be so-and-so pages grew to the 50 pages it now is.
I thought “Well, that’s a good sign for fellow coffee drinkers in the US of A; After this, prominent chefs (and thus prominent restaurants) will surely put more effort in their coffee, and then the mainstream restaurants will follow suit. What a great development! I wonder if it will happen here in my country…”
Then I read your latest post here. Which of course jumbled all my expectations. I still don’t get it : You “…don’t want our chefs obsessing over our coffee service.”. I still don’t understand why.
I think it’s great that chefs are interested — even if the results of that interest have often been suspect.
However, curiosity doesn’t translate to commitment. In other words, I wouldn’t get hopes up too high. They also have to think about wine lists, cheese, dessert menus, tea, port, cocktail menus, aperitifs, cordials, decór, table service, kitchen staff, inventory, produce suppliers, butchers, etc., etc. Coffee service would be lucky to get 5 or 10 minutes of a chef’s thoughts on any given day.
Myhrvold’s series has the side-effect of distorting that reality by dedicating a chapter to coffee — the same it devotes to wine. (While devoting nothing to many of the other components that equally, or moreso, make up a restaurant service or the culinary arts.)
Not that Myhrvold should have been held to some ridiculously proportionate quota system in his books. But reading both reviews on that series, I got the impression that two notable people passionate about coffee expected that level of treatment — when in fact it’s a statistical outlier. Realizing how much of an outlier it is made me conclude that the war for reliably good restaurant coffee is unwinnable.
OK, CMIIW : so you’re saying there’s a difference/discrepancy between “the fact” and “the newly set expectations”? And that it’s only compounding the problem already existing in restaurants’ coffee service?
And CMIIW too : you’re saying that the coffee industry “asks too much” from the whole F&B industry, by saying that they should be “treated special, or we don’t even want to share our specialty with you”?
I wouldn’t say the discrepancy between reality and expectations is compounding the problem. But I would say the discrepancy is what gives some coffee advocates a “suspension of disbelief” (myself included, until recently) — to quote the movie industry.
We can go on for years thinking that restaurant coffee is a poor shadow of what it could be, and we secretly hold steadfast to the hope of its possible redemption — given what we see in other corners of coffee consumerism. Well, that’s self-deceit.
Some of the same motivators behind that self-deceit are also at play when the SCAA conference expects restaurateurs to come to their conferences. “We love coffee and all its complexity, how could they not too?” But restaurateurs cannot afford that exclusivity of focus.
Since the 1950s, supermarkets decimated local butcher shops, bakers, produce markets, and the like because of their convenience to consumers, not vendors. The SCAA culinary track acts like the butcher who is blissfully ignorant that their “customers” would have any other needs competing for their attention.
Btw, my wife and I still get a slight laugh when we read about Myhrvold’s obsession with sous-vide cooking. Way back in the early 1980s, I worked as a dishwasher for a Wag’s restaurant operating a temperature-controlled commercial dishwasher in the Chicago suburbs. You’d pull down a lever-arm and blast a rectangular enclosure (filled with dirty dishes) with hot water until the time and temperature were right.
Being surrounded by so much food in freezer and refrigerator storage, for lunch I would essentially grab a few things off the shelves and put them in Zip-lock bags, tossing them into the dishwasher to cook them while sealed inside. Probably not food safe, certainly, but it was essentially sous-vide cooking.
Hearing about sous-vide discussed today, I joke that I invented it in the early 80s (it was actually invented in the 1970s). But more to the point, I cannot take it too seriously as a “modernist” form of cooking given my persective.
Is sous vide the same with cooking something slowly? In SE Asia, some famouse stalls/hawker sells many food that are prepared for hours. For examply, the broth for fish soup is cooked in very low heat but for many 8-10 hours.
About the “butcher shop” analogy, in relation to coffee, I once read about how *$ in fact made the moms-and-pops coffee shop around it thrives, the reason being that people don’t really want *$ coffee everyday on their way to work, and will go to the next door coffee shop to get a tastier (and usually more expensive) coffee. CMIIW since I only read it on the net.
In the end, how do you propose making restaurant coffee more “bearable” compared to current condition? Roaster doing roadshows from restaurants to restaurants?
Sous-vide isn’t primarily about slow cooking, though that is certainly how it plays out. It’s about controlling an ambient temperature that you want to match in whatever you’re cooking and letting everything reach a thermodynamic equilibrium. Other methods of cooking are typically faster and more uneven, since they rely on a greater temperature gradient between the two.
I hadn’t heard that *$ theory. I’m a bigger believer that *$ does a good job of establishing a local market for better coffee and the mom-&-pops benefit from increased awareness and demand. You see this in a city like SF when a neighborhood goes from one restaurant to three or four: the demand actually increases. And in much of the Western world, *$ plays a critical role in the “coffee food chain”: it’s rare to find good mom-&-pops without a neighborhood *$ as a stepping stone.
As for making restaurant coffee more bearable, it all starts from consumers’ money. Restaurant patrons have to be willing to frequent places with good coffee service and be willing to pay a premium for it. Restaurants often get operationally profitable on the liquor bill or bar tab, and even a ridiculously overpriced $5 espresso offers them little profit margin in comparison to the rest of the menu.
Many respectable points. I just think that, like you have with topics like “Third Wave,” you’re hastily jumping to conclusions.
A good summary of my issue with your post is from your comment #7 above: “As for making restaurant coffee more bearable, it all starts from consumers’ money.”
It’s really much more of a chicken-and-egg thing than that, and I think you’ve (very often in this blog, in fact) taken a snapshot of a specialty-coffee industry in its relative infancy and indicted us for not being totally successful. I agree that many out there are annoyingly presumptuous in certain declarations, but I don’t think that accurately reflects the core of the specialty industry.
Also, making restaurant coffee “more bearable” is not the end-game. In fact, there’s no identifiable “end game.” Making ALL coffee “more bearable” is a viable mission for the specialty, albeit an aspirational one, don’t you think?
I think that your commentary on the SCAA “Culinary Track” is interesting. Calling it “distorted” is attributing too much to the intentions there. The “Culinary Track” is simply about providing restaurant-folks with a particular engagement-point at the otherwise industry free-for-all that SCAA Expo can be. Chefs, culinary-school students, and restaurateurs DO attend SCAA Expo. Is it really “distorted” that the SCAA might take the time to help those folks with a specially-rolled-out red carpet? Is it better to just let them fend for themselves? By the way, there have been “Retailer Tracks” and “Producer Tracks” as well.
I continue to be bewildered by your blog. I enjoy your writing, and I appreciate many of your insights. However, you quite often seem to take aim at odd targets and arrive at equally odd conclusions.
That said, we should plan on getting together soon to chat! When’s good for you?
Yeah, I’m a nut case, Nick. I will not deny. Thanks for the good comments, though.
And yes — I’m definitely up for a Peninsula coffee!