For a few years now, we had an idea for a post that sat in our unpublished queue: how can you tell a good espresso shop from a bad one? (At least before sampling it.) Given the thousands of good, bad, and mediocre espresso shots we’ve reviewed over the years, we have definitely noticed some patterns worth sharing.

It wouldn’t be the first time I’ve recognized the value of shorthand rules. Back in the 1980s, I once (famously, in my circles) observed that the ghetto status of your neighborhood can be surmised by the fast food chicken chain nearby. (In short, Church’s Chicken = “wear Kevlar”.) Earlier this month, there were a couple of coffee-related posts from coffee professionals that inspired us to dust off this idea:

• Flavorwire » Blog Archive » The Kool-Aid’s in the Coffee: An Interview with David Latourell of Intelligentsia Coffee Roaster
• Detecting a Great Coffee Shop with the CoffeeMeister – Slashfood

But while coffee professionals know their establishments and their industry favorites best, few have subjected themselves to the horrors of many a bad espresso bar from a consumer perspective. Not that we at CoffeeRatings.com have a taste-bud death wish. But we’ve developed a sort of sixth sense about what to expect just by walking into a coffeehouse and having a look around. This post is an attempt to articulate both the positive and negative cues we get when entering a new establishment.

Some suggested rules are more obvious — like the wine enthusiast’s equivalent of “avoid wine that comes in a box.” Other rules are more subtle or outright unusual. For example, as a news story today had it, if the aroma from the coffee machine forces your plane to make an emergency landing, you might consider tea.

Encouraging signs of decent coffee ahead

In no particular order…

• They roast their own. Score extra points if they date-stamp their roasted beans for retail sale.
• They bother with latte art. Latte art is more gimmick than a sign of quality per se (sorry, Aussies). But it’s almost unheard of to find a place that bothers with latte art and yet makes a lousy cappuccino.
• A La Marzocco machine. Oh, sure, there are plenty of other great espresso machines out there. And there are places that can make great espresso from the most modest equipment choices. But shelling out the bucks for a La Marzocco is typically reserved for those who believe it will actually make a difference for them.
• They offer more than one kind of bean for espresso. This is a rare find. But when they do, they expect you to notice that the espresso there isn’t just some generic, nameless commodity shot out of a soda gun. Many other establishments think more like Homer Simpson’s tour of the Duff Beer factory, where a single spigot fills Duff, Duff Light, and Duff Dry.
• They serve a glass of water on the side. Despite the American obsession with the Big Gulp®, espresso should not quench your thirst. Better espresso can often be found at places that don’t expect it to.
• They take time to make it. You could have a really new, or really slow, barista. Or they could be a little bit of a perfectionist about what they’re doing. We never encourage our baristi to rush the job.
• Cleanliness is next to decent espresso. If the staff keeps their work areas clean, there are better chances that they clean their equipment of rancid coffee oil build-up — and that they keep their equipment properly tuned and maintained.

Signs of when to run — don’t walk — away

Now for the cues when you know things are about to get ugly. Call it coffee’s homage to Waiter Rant’s “Signs An Establishment Isn’t Going to Deliver the Service You Expect”.

• The roar and/or whine of poorly steamed milk. This is one of those cases where their handling of milk can translate to their handling of coffee. And milk that is steamed in the pitcher to the scalding sounds of a 747 takeoff or the squeal of a dentist’s drill is a major red flag.
• A superautomatic espresso machine. Superautomatic machines almost never produce an espresso better than “palatable”. Hello, Starbucks.
• The barista is wearing a company-issue hat or cap. One sure-fire way to non-verbally tell a customer, “How may I massacre your order?” is to require them to dress like fast food employees.
• They use a two-group La Spaziale 3000 espresso machine. Ouch. Do we really have that much against La Spaziale? They honestly make some good equipment, and a few cafés are quite capable with them. But in the Bay Area, the two-group La Spaziale 3000 is the machine of choice (namely: they’re inexpensive) among cafés looking to skimp and save a few bucks.
• America’s Best Coffee. Or Peerless coffee, should they admit it. The most common combination of the cheap-and-careless café is the two-group La Spaziale 3000 with America’s Best Coffee beans. A close second is Peerless coffee — which we’ve also found to be the coffee most likely for employees to say it’s Illy in an attempt to make up something that sounds better. Of course, almost as bad (it varies) is the café where the employees have no idea whose beans they serve. But the pattern here seems to be this: the more self-aggrandizing the coffee brand name, the worse the coffee.
• Portafilter handles are left cooling on the drip tray. This is often the kiss of death: a café that knows nothing about the importance of stable temperature control, and they could care less.
• Served with a lemon rind on the side. You’d be surprised how many restaurants still do this. Why? We don’t know, because it’s like a neon sign that says, “Prepare to spew.”
• Paper cups are the only option. There are times where even we want a coffee “to go”. But those conditions are so sub-par. For a café to serve their espresso only in paper cups, you may as well be greeted by a fiberglass clown head with a speakerphone in his throat at the drive-thru entrance. If someone’s idea of quality and class is the stemware at a four-year-old’s birthday party, we emphasize the “go” part of “to go”.
• Flavored coffees on the menu. Or the word “gourmet”. In some parts of the country, and rare corners of the Bay Area, the 1980s are still alive and well and some people are still selling chocolate macadamia nut flavored coffee. If a café sells coffee that sounds more like a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, you’d be better off looking for ice cream. Same goes if they use the word “gourmet” in their branding — a word that has since become affiliated only with the mass-produced packaged foods that line the aisles of Wal-Mart, marked for quick sale to their morbidly obese loyal customers.

We really need to stop here before we are overcome with snarkiness poisoning.

Recently we have been thinking about all the great, Top-20-caliber SF coffee bars that have opened up in recent years. So much so that the news of a great new espresso bar opening in town is thankfully becoming a little monotonous. With all the great coffee now available, we thought we could all use a helpful reminder of how bad things can get.

For anyone who watches a TV program involving food these days, there’s the tiresome, obligatory money shot of the chef or host sampling a dish, smirking to the camera after a mouthful, and exclaiming “Mmmmm, that’s delicious!” It’s never, “Ick! What’s that weird texture?,” or “Do you taste something metallic?,” or “I don’t think I’ll be coming here again.” With no sense of balance, it’s nearly impossible to truly appreciate the good stuff.

So where to find SF espresso’s misery market — the coffee shop equivalent of bumwine.com? (A favorite site of ours, btw.) While inside Farm:Table earlier this week, the four-packs of Café Bustelo on display were more trash-as-treasure than, say, the outright trash we were seeking. So we walked a few blocks from there into the heart of the Tenderloin and encountered a temple of physical self-abuse we could not resist: the L.A. Café at Turk and Jones Sts.

While it’s too easy to speak ill of the Tenderloin and its many disadvantaged and addled residents, there are few blocks in the city where you can view an Airstream trailer parked on the roof of a four-story building — just past a faded outdoor wall painting advertising 7up and “transient rooms” (see photo above). And yet this is hardly one of the Tenderloin’s worst intersections.

Everything about the place screamed, “Run! Don’t walk!” But even if going into a place like this to sample the espresso requires a mental state akin to donating your body to science, we couldn’t help ourselves. Even if we risked nightmares and waking up from our fitful sleep in cold sweats thinking about the place afterward.

Where to begin? The corner entrance has no fewer than two signs designating it as an emergency exit only. There are also no fewer than two “No Trespassing” signs posted by the SF police in their store windows — to deter vagrancy. So you have to walk inside via a side entrance further down Jones St.

Once inside, it looks like any Happy Donuts/Sad Espresso chain, with its plain tables and chairs. But this is misery coffee at its finest — complete with the very same neon coffee sign you can ironically find at China Basin‘s The Creamery.

At the far end of the café was a drugged-out, hooded Dave Chappelle look-alike who, perched over a table, did not move during the 30 minutes we were inside. The rest of the clientele who came in and out sported either gold teeth or wheelchairs, if not both. The pastries are covered in plastic, and the owners sport a Vietnamese calendar advertising bail bonds. If this is called “L.A. Café”, it’s clearly modeled more after downtown Broadway than Hollywood.

Using a two-group Astoria machine with the portafilter handles left out cooling in the drip tray, they pull surprisingly short shots of “espresso” that look and taste more like water than anything else. And, no surprise, they serve one of SF’s finest examples of ghetto coffee: America’s Best Coffee. Their homeopathic espresso comes coated with a balding layer of almost white-pale crema and tastes neither bitter nor ashy — nor much like anything at all. At a steep $1.75 price, we have to figure that the owners are gouging like anyone else trying to make a living in this neighborhood.

Currently L.A. Café is ranked tied for 609th place among SF’s best espresso shots, but it’s not the worst by a longshot. Scarier is that their 2.40 coffee rating still significantly trumps their 1.50 café rating, thus tying L.A. Café with an aforementioned Happy Donuts for SF’s third worst in the café rating category.

Read the review of L.A. Café.

After our sordid and tasteless espresso experience at L.A. Café, we could only think of this following sordid and tasteless video of Vince, the hooker-beating ShamWow guy, and how he hates L.A.:

UPDATE: June 3, 2009
And if you want to know the bottom of the coffee barrel in St. Paul, MN, we bring you: St. Paul’s Two Worst Cups of Coffee « The Heavy Table.

This café is something of a neighborhood favorite for its quirky atmosphere and ridiculously cheap (though not that great) coffee. Inside there’s found art everywhere — plus painted café tables, a couple of seats from movie theaters (with cup-holders), juicers on display, wine for $9 a bottle, and a few outdoor sidewalk café tables under parasols.

Using a two-group La Spaziale, they pull fuller shots that sit tall in a Lavazza-branded IPA cups. It has a medium-to-dark brown crema that runs a bit thin. And given the pour size, the flavor is not surprisingly a little watery as well. But the flavor of the cup is one of the limitations here: it’s more a mixture of mild pepper and a bit of water.

I asked the barista what beans they used, and he noted that they use the el cheapo America’s Best Coffee for espresso and the el cheapest (OK: la más barata) San Francisco Bay Coffee (available at Costco) for drip — but only after a long pause.

It’s hard to know whether the pause reflect that he couldn’t remember or if he was sheepish about the café’s choices. But what do you expect for $1 espresso? Perhaps it was appropriate that I had to reach the place on foot once my 38L Geary Express Muni bus transformed into a front-seat brawl, grounding the entire bus for a long while to take down police reports.

Read the review of Café Murano.

Opening in Nov. 2006, this space is aptly named “Coffee Lounge”. It has dark brown walls, spot lighting, large gallery art, lounge-like music, and it attracts more of an upscale, edgy crowd for the neighborhood. A mix of unique seating options spread throughout the long space. They serve some croissants and bakery items, but it’s largely about coffee here.

The owner, Jill Rosenthal, wrote CoffeeRatings.com to say that they used the site to sample the competition and ultimately decide upon a custom house roast — buying beans from the top-rated cafés and sampling them. They worked with Rick at ABC, of all roasters, to develop a custom blend (“organic house blend #5″) after side-by-side tastings — it’s an organic blend of dark Brazilian and dark & light Nicaraguan. And while some of that attention to detail shows, they still have some kinks to work out — not surprising for a newer place, however.

Using a two-group Nuova Simonelli Premier, they pull shots with a thinner body and a thinner layer of a mottled, medium brown crema. They staff deliberately pre-heat cups and take the time to do it right — they just need more practice. Flavorwise, it has a slightly burnt/bitter edge a la Martha & Bros: strong tobacco and some ash. Their heart is in the right place, but they need to work on the execution. My own personal tastes, but I might start by upgrading the ABC beans. (Which isn’t to say that ABC makes bad beans, but most of the places that carry them often have poor espresso.)

Read the review of Sugarlump Coffee Lounge.

I hate writing about espresso bars in regression when there’s every reason for us to expect progression. There’s a rising tide of coffee quality that should theoretically lift all boats: McDonald’s is offering premium roast from Gaviña, 7-Eleven is offering single origin Kenya AA and Hawaiian Kona … and late last year Café de la Presse made a big upgrade from America’s Best Coffee with a far better blend in Philadelphia’s La Colombe Torrefaction — one of the most esteemed specialty roasters in the country.

What’s this I hear? A très français café with espresso Greg not only tolerates, but he likes?! Yes, it’s true — at least at Café de la Presse. But it wasn’t always this way.

This spot is a classic French café/bistro at the southern Grant St. gates of Chinatown, strategically located near the Alliance Française de San Francisco. It has authentic bistro tables inside and out (the sidewalk café seating is very popular when the weather encourages it) — with a bent towards foreign tourist accents that also flock to the international newsstand. The service is Euro-slow and generally only good if you want to linger over an issue of Paris Match like many other patrons.

This café underwent a major facelift in 2005 — and for much the better. It now has a traditional zinc bar, the magazine rack moved to the back, and most importantly the espresso improved significantly. They replaced their cheap twin Astoria machines with a less cheap three-group La Spaziale. But their change in coffee beans and renewed attention to barista skills were the most significant improvements.

They now serve espresso with a relatively generous, and very un-French-like, medium-dark brown crema — poured in a tall brown ceramic cup (from Germany’s Caffé Ti Amo) with an odd spoon. Flavorwise, it has a woodsy, herbal flavor and a mildly warm serving temperature. This is a vast improvement over this café’s previous M.O. — it was once known for faint rings of crema and a slightly bitter tobacco flavor due to their inferior equipment, bean choices, and laissez-faire attitude towards espresso preparation. Last year I noted them as one of the most improved SF cafés of 2005. You can now actually drink something besides a café au lait with the cat-sized milk bowl here.

And as often happens, paradoxically, when places improve their espresso: the price per shot dropped 50¢.

Read the updated review.