Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Not to be confused with Cento, which is decidedly at the opposite end of the amenity scale, this is a classically pretty café at the rear entrance of the elegant Fairmont Hotel. It caters primarily to hotel tourists — many of whom come from around the globe and get a little homesick for something other [...]

An Op-Ed piece in Monday’s Washington Post noted the curious phenomenon of local culture that is exported, reinterpreted abroad, and then imported back again. The article’s topic was the wildly received recent openings of Starbucks cafés in cities such as Warsaw and Prague — with the backdrop of their centuries-old coffeehouse culture traditions: Anne Applebaum [...]

If you blog about coffee long enough, you see the same introductory articles about coffee over and over and over (did we mention over?) again. The Internet continually drones with a strange-yet-familiar mantra, where each week you find dozens of newspaper articles, magazine articles, commerce sites, and blog posts that feel compelled to regurgitate the [...]

Yesterday’s New York Times published an article on the accelerating demise of the neighborhood French café: Across France, Cafe Owners Are Suffering – NYTimes.com. This time last year, we scoffed at the suggestion that France’s then-impending smoking ban would trigger the collapse of French café society. But sure enough, that collapse appears to be in [...]

Sometimes this blogging business can get far too serious. Especially when most blogs are about procrastination, wasting time, and utterly pointless exercises — such as answering the important existential question, “What kind of coffee drink best represents me?” Well today’s post is for you. “I am one of 112 million bloggers: hear me roar.” First [...]

As with every anti-smoking measure, the Chicken Littles come out in force to announce the untimely death of a lifestyle or era. This time it is France’s turn: Will the smoking ban in France mean the end of café society? – International Herald Tribune. What has inevitably happened in every case is that the Chicken [...]

Today’s London Times published something of a book review of a new four-volume series, Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture (Markman Ellis, editor): Smell the coffee – Times Online. It’s a long-winded article. But compared to the British tolerance for long-winded, academic tomes (it clocks in at a whopping 1,840 pages), the article is a walk in the [...]