Espresso News and Reviews - TheShot.coffeeratings.com

We’re more than a bit late with the news here, but a hearty and well-deserved congratulations to Kyle Glanville of LA’s Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea for winning the 2008 U.S. Barista Championship (USBC): 2008 US Barista Champion « The Official 2008 SCAA Conference Blog.

Proving the West is Best, and giving us some minor trash-talking rights, five of the six finalists all hailed from our own backyard Western Regional Barista Competition. Booyah.

Could we get any further away from Minneapolis? Please?

We weren’t exactly glued to our monitors for the blow-by-blow updates of the USBC as some have. Part of that is being in India, where everything is 12½-hours ahead of Pacific Time (yes, there is an extra 30 minutes in there). But a bigger part reflects the forced spectacle of barista competitions in addition to the overall SCAA conference spectacle itself.

The redeeming qualities of the SCAA conference include a number of interesting presentations and topics of discussion, elements the USBC, and the Roasters Guild Coffee of the Year Competition. But there are also big sponsorships by the irrelevant likes of Krups and Da Vinci Gourmet syrups (never trust a product that has “gourmet” in its name), soapbox political causes that have been uniquely attracted to coffee like flies to a bug lamp, and featured or “award-winning” irrelevant products — such as java jackets (just say no to paper cups), the 2008 PR onslaught of the Handpresso (wow, now we can drink crap pod coffee on the go!), and the exhumed resurgence of a PR onslaught for “Red Espresso” (which is no more “espresso” than if I put orange pulp in my espresso machine and called it “Orange Espresso”) after a two year hiatus.

In short: many of the things about the coffee industry I really don’t like and wish would go away. If this is the promise of the so-called “Third Wave” as advertised on the SCAA conference Web site, please drown me now in the undertow.

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While I’ll be checking out Barista Coffee in India, Minneapolis will be hosting this year’s U.S. Barista Championship during the SCAA conference this weekend.

Yesterday, the host city’s hometown paper, the Star Tribune, published a rather lengthy article on the event: The great barista battle is brewing. It’s a story that’s been covered dozens, if not hundreds, of times before. But besides the usual descriptions of contestants’ “espresso cocktails” (specialty drinks), they touched on an interesting point for the industry:

“Caribou, after Starbucks the nation’s second-largest purveyor of coffee in terms of number of stores, is a major sponsor of the conference, yet has no baristas entered in the competition. Why don’t titans like Starbucks and Caribou participate?”

It’s a great question. The article quotes the new SCAA president, Mark Inman, who suggests that the barista championship is an underground cult and that the big, deep-pocketed coffee pushers are casing out the event before getting more involved. But that’s as much a load of crap as the self-serving “Third Wave” platitudes on the conference Web site.

Starbucks’ and Caribou’s Public Humiliation Championship 2008 — presented by Krups

Sure, according to Mr. Inman, Starbucks and Caribou should “have the resources to hire and train the best talent in the industry and sweep the competitions.” But it’s not because “they choose not to expose themselves to this arena”. What big corporation doesn’t want free PR and employees who can boast national awards? Particularly Starbucks these days, who are desperate to claim some kind of coffee quality relevance after selling their souls and taking the highway to fast-food hell.

Mr. Inman is being rather disingenuous — he knows better than that. Krups is once again sponsoring the competition, afterall — a company that profited for decades selling an armada of landfill-bound home espresso machines. The reason Starbucks and Caribou don’t participate is because they are incapable of participating and they are afraid of the embarrassment when that fact publicly comes to light.

The No Espresso Left Behind Act

The best baristas in the country are not lured to work for the big chains to prefect their craft and their love of coffee. And even if they were, Starbucks’ espresso delivery system™ would put their baristas behind equipment and supplies that place them at an extreme competitive disadvantage: no barista trained on a push-button Verismo or Mastrena machine, using pre-packaged beans purchased in bulk supply for chain consistency, would have a chance against the competition.

The truth is that Starbucks and Caribou don’t want an event to prove to the public how woefully inadequate their coffee standards are — especially when compared to the level of competition that comes to these championships. If millions of their customers realized how much coffee quality they were being cheated out of at $4 a pop, it would be a boon for many independent coffeeshops and it would scuttle corporate coffee with long-lasting damage.

Big corporate coffee may not be that great, but they’re not so stupid as to give away their dirty secrets. The coffee quality strategy of major chains like Starbucks and Caribou isn’t at the high end of the scale — i.e., to provide the best coffee possible served by their most talented staff. Instead, their strategies are focused at the low end — i.e., how to best elevate the worst coffee made among all their chain stores using the least-skilled staff available to them.

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With Spring upon us, that means it’s time for the 2008 Western Regional Barista Competition (WRBC): ‘Attention to every detail’ at Berkeley barista contest - San Jose Mercury News. Starting this past Friday and ending today (check out their photo album), the 2008 WRBC performs a time-honored ritual to select a barista champ representing our region to send to the nationals, the U.S. Barista Championship (USBC), to be held in Minneapolis this May.

The WRBC is the biggest of the nation’s ten regionals and includes competitive baristas from California and Hawaii. This year they even drew in a couple of competitors from Seattle’s Zoka Coffee.

But the big question was whether Coffee Klatch’s (San Dimas, CA) Heather Perry, the WRBC’s “Iron Barista” of the past several years, could be unseated from her usual first place finish. Last year, Heather defended her WRBC title yet again, went on to win the 2007 U.S. Barista Championship (a feat she also accomplished in 2003), and then placed second in the 2007 World Barista Championship (to the UK’s James Hoffman).

But there was more at stake than just Heather’s streak. After spending a few years in Petaluma (where we reviewed the 2006 WRBC), this year’s WRBC moved to downtown Berkeley. And this year there were more seminars, training opportunities, and awards.

Berkeley, we have a problem…

Many baristas and coffee fanatics in the Bay Area were enthusiastic about the WRBC’s choice of a new location and venue — including us. But when we attended today’s competition finals, we found both negatives as positives with the switch.

The good

• Location, location, location — A block off of BART? In downtown Berkeley? In a town where Alfred Peet started his specialty bean and leaf business back in 1966?
• An upper balcony, for viewing the competition from above — The Gaia Arts Center provided the public with more and better angles to view the competition.
• Video projection — And where Gaia’s upper balcony views weren’t enough, the WRBC used video cameras and two projection screens to zoom in on the action — providing detailed, hands-level views to many attendees.
• The Clover brewer at the 4th Machine — Introduced for the first time at the WRBC, just in time for Starbucks to buy them out, some area roasters featured Cup-of-Excellence-quality coffee. Maybe these machines have little place in a barista competition per se, but they have good company around coffee lovers everywhere.
• Merchandising — Every event planner needs to raise a little cash to keep operations going and improve the event (especially at this price: free). The WRBC seems to have expanded beyond the T-shirt offerings and is now hawking espresso cups, cappuccino cups, tampers, shot glasses, etc. All of which seemed to be doing a brisk business at the entrance.

The bad

• Cramped facilities — Despite the location and the upper balcony, the facilities themselves seemed woefully inadequate. The space was too small, and crowds packed in the main competition area so much that some attendees had to fan themselves from the build-up of body heat. People crowded the stairs leading to the upper balcony just to find space for a better view.
• No barrier between the competition area and the 4th Machine — “Kitchen stadium” (to use an Iron Chef term) was always at the mercy of the noise and distractions coming from all of the socializing by the 4th Machine — where attendees lined up for a free espresso, cappuccino, or Clover-brewed coffee. You couldn’t hear the baristas nor the emcees over the din.
• No press box, no sponsored booths — The WRBC isn’t a conference. Or is it? There already are speakers, trainings, etc. But if this competition expects the media coverage it craves, it needs to think bigger. That will irritate many die-hard, DIY baristas as “too corporate” — the event still has the strong feel of their private, exclusive club or party. But coffee is also a business — it must decide to either continue to play coy with the real world, and favor their own anti-corporate Hipsters in its own private sandbox, or it has to reach out to play with and compete against the big boys in order to be taken more seriously.

The ugly

• Is there a steady cam in the house? — While the use of video projection was a plus, unfortunately very little of it was useful. Perhaps the cameramen had too many espresso shots from the 4th Machine to hold anything still, but we couldn’t help but feel we were watching The Blair Witch Project turned on to coffee.
• The emcee — Maybe it’s just impossible to replicate the coffee street cred, public speaking skills, and infectious enthusiasm of Barefoot’s Andy Newbom as when he emceed the 2006 WRBC. But emcee Sarah Allen was not terribly dynamic nor engaging in her role. Coincidentally, Ms. Allen is the editor of Barista Magazine — a magazine subscription we’ve recently let expire because, well, as much as we like the subject matter, we find the writing to be rather poor at best. (For example, most articles from the far corners of the world are activity logs rather than actual writing. With the exception of Ritual’s Gabe Boscana and a few others, good espresso artists aren’t always good writers. Public speaking isn’t far behind.)
• The other emcee — While we did not have the privilege of hearing the other emcee for the event — Jana Oppenheimer, a regional sales manager for Franke — having a sales rep from Franke emcee a barista competition makes about as much sense as having an SF Muni official emcee a NASCAR event. La Marzocco GS/3 distrubution included. But given that Krups is once again sponsoring the USBC in May, this is one of the prices of going corporate while still keeping the event free to the public.

And the winner is…

Of the six finalists, half was a posse representing Intelligentsia’s Silverlake (LA) location. But in the end, the “unthinkable” happened. The final results?:

• 1st Place: Chris Baca of Ritual Coffee Roasters, SF
• 2nd Place: Kyle Glanville of Intelligentsia, Silverlake
• 3rd Place: Heather Perry of Coffee Klatch, San Dimas

Congratulations to all winners, all finalists, and all contestants…

UPDATE: April 4, 2008
Today NPR’s The California Report aired a radio segment on the 2008 WRBC, interviewing Kyle Glanville and Chris Baca: KQED | The California Report | Crowning the Best Barista.

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Yesterday Public Radio International’s (PRI) The World aired a broadcast on the Italian espresso: Espresso | PRI’s The World. While every news outlet in America was regurgitating Starbucks‘ publicity over their token three-hour store closure for employee training, reporter David Leveille took a different approach by interviewing the art of the espresso from a distinctly Italian perspective.

(David Leveille tried to contact me for an interview for this story yesterday morning — he was particularly interested because this blog regularly cites the Gambero Rosso Bar d’Italia. But alas, that day job thing kept me from getting back to him in time for his deadline.)

The radio story gets a few details wrong — for example, a proper espresso is produced with near-boiling water, not steam as reported in the story. But the story outlines how Italian baristas “perfect their craft over the period of years, not hours”. It even includes an interview with the head barista at Sant’Eustachio il caffè, who is as comically arrogant and opaque about their methods and materials as you’d expect from this beloved café. (There’s something about Europeans and the ceremony of the safely guarded culinary secret, such as the Pastéis de Belém in Lisbon.)

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It’s a rather snarky press release, but we confess to being amused by it: Coffee Klatch Roasting Celebrates Starbucks Store Closures With Free Coffee for Everyone.

These days, Howard Schultz’s return to the CEO post at Starbucks has resembled nothing short of a panicked man caught on a runaway bulldozer, pulling every lever and knob he can find to steer the thing before it careens off a cliff. Last week, Starbucks announced that they were going to temporarily close some 7,100 cafés nationwide for three hours — to retrain some 135,000 in-store employees and people who oversee the stores.

Hopefully it’s to teach them what a proper espresso should really taste like. However, as San Dimas’ Coffee Klatch owner, Mike Perry, pointed out in his press release, “I’m not sure why it’s going to take them 3 hours to learn how to press a button.” Touché. We first met Mike at the 2006 Western Regional Barista Competition, and he knows good coffee. (His daughter, Heather, won that competition as well as last year’s U.S. Barista Championship.)

Hitting a company when it’s down smacks of a little schadenfreude, no matter how big the company. Starbucks did popularize better coffee in this country more than anyone else, even if today they are a lot like Mikhael Gorbachev’s relevance to Russian governance after perestroika. But if Howard Schultz were to take our advice for improving the espresso standards at Starbucks, and if he were truly serious about his commitment to quality, we would only close about 6,900 of those 7,100 cafés — but never reopen them.

UPDATE: Feb. 20, 2008
Not to be outdone, Seattle’s Caffé Vita (one of the famous ‘V’s of great Seattle espresso) is offering a similar promotion, according to a blog on today’s Seattle Post-Intelligencer: Feb. 26: First No Coffee, Now Free Coffee.

UPDATE: Feb. 21, 2008
One successful press release can sometimes lead to another: Coffee Klatch Roasting Anti-Starbucks Promotion Sparks Nationwide Free Indie Coffee Uprising.

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One of the worst-kept secrets of the past few years is that McDonald’s has been trying to get into the espresso business. Today, news services such as Reuters and the Wall Street Journal are reporting that McDonald’s plans to launch coffee bars with the new employee position of “barista”: McDonald’s coffee bars to take on Starbucks: report | Reuters.

Undoubtedly, McDonald’s will hire or convert thousands minimum wage employees who couldn’t tell a robusta from a McSkillet, give them about two hours of training, and place them behind boxy, push-button, superautomated espresso machines producing paper cups full of a rather watered-down, ashy brew that barely resembles espresso. In turn, some of them will then master the art of “dishwater” milk frothing and graduate to making cappuccinos and lattes. In other words, McDonald’s is going to follow in Starbucks‘ footsteps.

Well, more power to the clown. Even if we still think McDonald’s is misguided in trying to refashion Ronald into a Happy-Meal-peddling pusher of lowest common denominator espresso. Starbucks, who in the past has verbally invited the McDonald’s challenge, will now truly discover how far their espresso quality — and ability to differentiate their product — has fallen after years of massive tradeoffs made to support their insanely ambitious expansion plans. Maybe not enough to shake off Starbucks’ most loyal customers, but enough to keep them bleeding. (Though if McDonald’s adds Wi-Fi at their Playlands, who knows?)

The downside is that we’re not looking forward to having to sample a few of McDonald’s offerings — the sacrifice required for the sake of research and completeness of our database of comparative espresso reviews. Well, that and paper-hatted employees with bad acne telling us in their pubescent cracking voices, “Would you like four pumps of vanilla and caramel syrup with that?”

UPDATE: 4:15pm PST
Now that Jim Donald got the axe as Starbucks CEO, with chairman Howard Schultz to replace him, this just got more interesting: Starbucks Founder Returns as Chief - New York Times. Starbucks shareholders are pinning their hopes that Schultz is the coffee industry’s equivalent to Steve Jobs.

Now just because their national holiday ad campaign has ended, don’t think that Starbucks has given up their Pass The Cheer spirit. They will Pay It Forward on Mr. Donald’s golden parachute for some time to come.

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Yesterday’s New York magazine online reviewed the new East Village coffee bar named Abraço: Abraço — New York Magazine Restaurant Review. Just opened Oct. 17th of this year, one of its partners is also famously the former Blue Bottle Coffee Co. barista, Jamie McCormick.

The review also oddly noted, “The thought of ranking coffee bars never crossed our minds. And for good reason: How do you review a coffee bar? Or rather, why would you?” With questions like that, is it any wonder why the general quality of NYC coffee is so inexcusably poor — and why (as indicated in a recent survey) New York ranked second only to Dallas/Ft. Worth for the lowest rate of coffee consumption among American cities?

On one hand, Abraço should (hopefully) do extremely well given the general lack of alternatives. On the other hand, the phrase “like pearls before swine” does come to mind. (My coffee snobbery is clearly showing, but New York’s coffee standard is beyond any comprehension.) Hopefully Jamie and company will experience more of the former as part of the movement that’s starting to open the deadened eyes and taste buds of New York coffee drinkers.

The New York Times “Dining Briefs” section picked up Abraço for a review: The New York Times > New York City Restaurant Reviews - NEW PLACES - Abraço Espresso. Surprisingly, they didn’t follow the usual habit of reviewing coffee bars as they would gas stations. They actually used adjectives when describing their coffee.

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Seattle’s Coffee Fest trade show ended yesterday. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer published an article announcing the winners of its “Millrock Free Pour Latte Art competition” (isn’t that a mouthful?): Artistic cup of joe brings home $5,000 prize.

Top honors and $5,000 of prize money went to Layla Emily Osberg of Vancouver, BC’s Blenz Coffee — where I first discovered that the default “macchiato” can be colloquially defined as something far scarier than I ever imagined. (Second place for “Draw Tippy the Turtle in milk foam” went to the award-winning Canadian barista, Colter Jones.)

Now I generally find it difficult to get excited about latte art — or even the US Barista Championship these days. However, the best suggestion for any kind of barista competition came from April Pollard, a finalist from Seattle’s Espresso Vivace with “real world” sensibilities about the spectacle. From the article:

She compared the event to a “beautiful baby” contest, and she added that a “real barista contest” would include having 10 customers in a line, one person being a jerk, something going wrong and a person a wanting a muffin while talking on a cell phone.

“They should make it like a normal day,” Pollard said.

Bravo, April. Now we’re talking. Oh, but wait — I first gotta take this call.

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Piemonte, or Piedmont, is a province located in the Italy’s northwest — near the Alps. Other than the 2006 Winter Olympics, the region has largely been a blind spot on the tourist’s map. Travel guidebooks and TV programs routinely ignore it. And that’s just the way we like it.

For example, in Torino — Piemonte’s capital and biggest city (and unified Italy’s first capital) — you can enjoy a vibrant Italian city with a population just larger than San Francisco that’s virtually unscarred by tourists. Here the spoken English language is still more of an engaging novelty — and not the ever-present drone of invading hoards carrying water bottles and looking for Renaissance art.

And while Piemonte represents only one of 20 provinces in Italy, it’s home to one-third of the 18 top cafés in Italy — at least according to Gambero Rosso. Torino itself lays claim to four of them — three more than any other town in the country.

But coffee is just the beginning of this region’s story. Despite lacking Italy’s biggest-name cultural treasures and tourist attractions, the area is rich with history, Baroque architecture, Roman ruins, hilltop Savoy castles, the Savoys’ answer to Versailles (La Venaria Reale, which opened the weekend we visited), arguably the best wine region in the country, an obsessive preoccupation with perfect food, excellent espresso, and the greatest grand café culture the world over.

There have been some significant changes since we were last in Torino (in May 2004, prior to the Olympics): far less air pollution (many city buses now run on cleaner energy), more infrastructure (they opened one of their two planned subway lines), and the conversion of the Lingotto complex from FIAT factory to Olympic Village to mega-mall.

Piemonte’s Food & Wine Obsession

To understand the context of Piemonte’s coffee culture, it first helps to understand their unique obsession with food and wine. Now in Italy, everything is about good food of course. But the Piemontese take this obsession to a whole other level. Emilia-Romagna may represent the heart of Italian culinary tradition, but Piemonte takes the traditional and decidedly makes it into deconstructed, modern art. In all my travels, I have never experienced anything quite like it.

Piemonte is the birthplace of the Slow Food movement and hosts its headquarters. We ate at restaurants where the menus listed the origins of their flour, butter, olive oil, etc. It’s home to barolo and barbaresco wines. The town of Alba is famous for the white truffle and its annual fair. And Torino is infamous for its gelato, it’s the birthplace of the chocolate bar (and home to arguably the world’s best chocolate), and it hosts the world’s biggest food and wine market in Eataly — an old Carpano vermouth factory that was converted into a kind of SF Ferry Building Marketplace on crack and steroids.

Despite popular local dishes that justifiably sound foul — such as crudo di Fossano, raw piles of veal, and vitello tonnato, veal topped with a tuna sauce (both excellent when done well) — the only thing we advise you to avoid is the pizza. It’s the one thing where they come up average (even the Ligurian farinata here). Most Americans don’t realize that pizza is a regional, not a national, dish. The popular consumption of pizza (as a Neapolitan creation) reached as far north as Roma just some 40 years ago. We’ve been eating pizza in Kansas for longer than many parts of Italy.

Piemonte Espresso Culture

What don’t you know already about Italians and their coffee culture? The Piemontese follow the traditional Italian culture of having a quick espresso several times a day like clockwork. It’s an excuse to socialize in brief spurts; it’s the equivalent of a “smoke break” and platonic speed dating. And as in many other parts of Italy, employees stuck in offices and storefronts can have their espresso shots delivered (sometimes covered in tin foil for transport) straight from the café. At every public gathering place, there’s a social expectation that good espresso is accessible nearby.

Here there is virtually no such thing as a double shot, or doppio. People will order two successive shots, certainly, but not at the same time. This follows the pattern of how the Italians prefer smaller stove-top moka pots at home. And like other northern Italians, a number of cafés offer the apertivo (or happy hour) buffet spread of sandwiches, salads, and appetizers with your drink order. Enough to skip dinner.

And unlike the 22-year-old wannabe hipster baristas sporting T-shirts, piercings, and tattoos you find common to cafés in North America, Scandinavia, and Oceania, they are decidedly “no wave” here. Older baristas are commonplace, and younger baristas are often akin to apprentices. Both maintain generally high standards of professional appearance — including even white jackets and black bow ties — like true bartenders (given the origins of the word barista) you’d expect to see in a James Bond film. That is the grand café way.

However, the Piemontese seem to break with a number of Italian “traditions” — not all of them are necessarily good habits. Although the storefronts here shut down religiously for a long lunch, a number of Piedmontese seem to have picked up the 12-hour workday. While most Italian children are well-behaved compared to their over-stimulated American counterparts, here they often seem over-indulged and allowed to freely squeal in public. As for the Torinese, their restaurants seem flaming hot while the locals still bundle up in coats and gloves. And when walking their reluctant small dogs (they are close to the French border, afterall), the Torinese often look like they’re dragging a small pot roast on a leash.

But perhaps the most shocking difference of all from most other Italians is that the locals — not tourists, mind you — sometimes order a cappuccino or macchiato after noon. Even with dinner. This would be blasphemy to most Italian rules and regulations regarding proper daily digestion. But here, the sour sounds of a squealing milk-frother — foreign and as jarring as nails to a chalkboard — are not uncommon at dinner. Such brutes.

Given Torino’s chocolate history, one local drink of note is the bicerin. It is a concoction of coffee, liquid chocolate, and fior de latte — the latter of which is much like the cream on the Irish Coffee at SF’s Buena Vista Cafe. And just like the Buena Vista, although the drink is enjoyable, you’d be hard pressed to find locals drinking it.

Piemonte Espresso Quality

So what about the espresso quality? In Alba I picked up a copy of the 2008 Bar d’Italia del Gambero Rosso that had just been published (FWIW, their Ristoranti d’Italia guide is stellar and never steered us wrong). It served as a good guide of what cafés to start with. Along with the six Piemonte cafés awarded 3 chicchi and 3 tazzine, we selected a mix of additional cafés to judge both their best and the typical.

Not surprisingly, their best didn’t quite match the very select best in North America. However, the typical blew 80% of America’s cafés out of the water. This also created a sort of quality compression — with the best not being that much better than the typical. They were quite consistently served with a medium brown crema speckled with darker brown, as if a local standard, and often with a small glass of water on the side.

Another generalization was that, like Portugal, most of their espresso shots are a touch watery for my tastes — even at the standard 30-35ml size. But ordering it as a ristretto makes a huge difference. However, to ensure fair comparisons, I stuck to my standard criteria when making reviews. Of course, none of the locals order a simple “caffè”. Their coffee order is more likely to be in the form of an adjective or a prepositional phrase than a noun: con la schiuma, bollente, forte, con la cioccolata in polvere sopra, etc.

On the subject of milk-based drinks, some of the places with weaker, thinner espresso would oddly offer some of the best milk foaming. Many cafés exhibit a token amount of latte art, but the cappuccino here runs very wet — there’s usually just a minimal layer of foam. The macchiato is, however, rather popular — even at its modest size compared to American versions.

Piemonte Espresso Brands

Among the most common brands of coffee in the area, this was my general order of preference:

1. Caffè Mokabar (Torino)
2. Illy (Trieste)
3. MoKafè (Alba)
4. Torrefazione Ponchione (Asti)
5. Lavazza (native to Torino)
6. Caffè Deorsola (Torino)
7. Caffè Costadoro (Torino)
8. Caffè Alberto (Torino)
9. Caffè Vergnano (at least in their 1882-branded cafés, from the Torino suburb of Santena)

Piemonte generally follows the rule that northern Italians roast lighter than their southern counterparts. Contrary to the “Italian espresso” roast profile stereotype in America, the typical roast is medium to moderately dark brown with some second crack signs and almost no detectable oil on its surface (about an Agtron #45, in some roaster circles).

What’s undoubtedly most surprising from this list is how highly I rate Illy, let alone Lavazza. As I suspected at the Lisbon Espressamente last year, Illy coffee seems fresher and produces a much better cup in Italy than when shipped overseas — despite all their freshness quality controls. (Though I was just shipped a can of Danesi from their Northern California distributor, and I was truly amazed at what crema I could get out of an imported can.)

This also follows a preference pattern I noticed among the Piemontese. While some held local “artisan” roasters (such as MoKafè or Ponchione) with particularly high regard, in general the idea of buying from a local roaster was not nearly as compelling here as it is in the U.S. Part of that could be that the entire nation is about the size of Arizona. But I also got the sense that some of the bigger roasters, such as Illy and Lavazza, made such big investments in quality controls that “big national name brand” weren’t dirty words.

As for espresso machines, I came across some machines from Faema and fewer from Gaggia, La San Marco, and La Spaziale. The lion’s share was clearly La Cimbali. This made me recall the residents of Porto, Portugal (which I liken as a sister city to Torino) who originally called espresso “cimbalinho” in reference to all the La Cimbali equipment first introduced there.

In the coming weeks, we’ll publish a series of individual Piemonte/Torino café reviews and link back to them below here for reference.

† — Rated one of the top 18 cafés in all Italy by the 2007 & 2008 Bar d’Italia del Gambero Rosso (3 tazzine and 3 chicchi)

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I’ve been planning another road trip to Torino this October — my first since 2004. The wine and food are always excellent, the tourists are hard to come by (you can have an Italian city of almost a million people to yourself), Juventus is back in Serie A (and yesterday started the season off smashingly), and Torino always beckons with so many notable and good cafés. Like my travels to Portugal last year, this time I plan to take better notes about the espresso around town and in the neighboring countryside.

To help me do that, I recently picked up a copy of the Bar d’Italia del Gambero Rosso 2007 — an annual, 368-page guide to some of the best espresso bars on the Peninsula (the 2008 version of this guide is due out in early October). In case by “bar” you’re thinking of the drunken taverns here with terrible Bunn warmer coffee for designated drivers, in Italy a bar is more like an espresso bar with a liquor license. Hence why the term barista quite literally translates to “bartender”.

The “red shrimp”?!?

Gambero Rosso is a leading source for Italian gourmands, with Slow Food affiliations and a variety of publications that review the local food, wine, gelato, grappa, and everything in between. Think of them as a less stuffy Michelin Guide that concerns itself less with hotels and more than just restaurants. Many cafés in Italy also take great Michelin-star-like pride in their Gambero Rosso ratings; as an example, Gran Caffè Belli in Amandola, in the Le Marche region of central Italy, posted color scans of their 2003 & 2004 Gambero Rosso reviews on their Web site.

But instead of Michelin stars, Gambero Rosso awards bars up to three chicchi (or coffee beans) and three tazzine (or small coffee cups). The coffee beans are a measure of espresso quality, with a secondary influence of how it is served. The coffee cups represent a more complex judgment on the place, including the quality of any food offered, the level of service, the atmosphere, its cleanliness, the alcohol served, etc. They are a bit like the ratings on CoffeeRatings.com, with the beans representing the Espresso Score and the cups loosely representing the Cafe Score. But unlike CoffeeRatings.com, just getting listed in the Gambero Rosso guide is an honor in itself.

For some points of reference, here’s how some of Italy’s more famous cafés (err, bars) — and cafés with Bay Area connections — stack up:

The guide is far from perfect. I question how tough the standards are to achieve 3 chicchi — standards for espresso at the high end in Italy being notably lower than those in the States. But while Caffè Florian’s two chicchi rating seems ridiculously generous, sensibly Milan is lacking 3 chicchi candidates — with Gattullo and Pasticceria Marchesi as the lone exceptions. (Milan is one of Italy’s biggest espresso disappointments.)

In the end, it’s a very good guide — albeit available only in Italian — to keep you from drinking “average” espresso in Italy (which is still pretty damn good). I strongly recommend it for traveling espressophiles in Italy, even if you know very little Italian. It is almost as informative as the Ristoranti d’Italia del Gambero Rosso 2007 (also only available in Italian), the restaurant review equivalent which I recently picked up at the A. Cavalli & Co. Italian Bookstore in North Beach.

Given how hard it is to find Italian publications in the States, your best option to purchase a copy of the Bar d’Italia will likely be to order it over the Internet. The best deal I could find (better than the slow/non-existent e-mail response from Gambero Rosso — it’s August — and their €65,00 shipping) was from the Internet Bookshop, ibs.it (think Italy’s answer to Amazon.com), for €10,00 plus €12,60 for FedEx shipping that will get it to your door within a week. (This from personal experience.)

Swinging a dead cat for a good café in Torino

On the subject of Torino, it has plenty of representatives in Bar d’Italia. Torino has so many good cafés to choose from, the city has engendered an environment of competition through specialization. There the “café lifestyle” has taken on a diversity that is almost unparalleled.

To explain what this means in local terms, here in SF you have so much competition among good restaurants that almost no one serves “Italian” food anymore: restaurants here now specialize in regions such as Campania, Sardinia, Liguria, Venezia, Piemonte, or even Italian seafood. And of the 19 cafés in all of Italy [PDF, 152kb] awarded both Gambero Rosso’s 3 chicchi and 3 tazzine in 2007, four are in Torino — no other city has more than one. Two additional cafés are from the Piemonte region, for which Torino is the “state” capital. (Italy is made up of twenty different regions, each with a regional capital.)

With little margin between the best espresso quality in town, Torino cafés compete in ambiance by attaching themselves to film museums, libraries, the narrow basements of old buildings from the Roman settlement era, perfume shops in a private homes, places where Mini Coopers sped across marble-floored hallways in the original 1969 The Italian Job, and mothership cafés for Lavazza, Illy, etc. They should offer plenty for me to absorb while wigged out for several days on a caffeine bender.

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