Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

Today’s L.A. Weekly featured an interesting bio-piece on father and son L.A. espresso pioneers, Ambrose and Guy Pasquini: Q & A with Ambrose and Guy Pasquini: L.A.’s Single Espresso Origin – Los Angeles Restaurants and Dining – Squid Ink. You might recognize the Pasquini name for some of their excellent home espresso machines. But the [...]

This Sausalito location of a two-café chain in Marin (the other location is in San Rafael) looks almost identical to the Caffé Trieste that once stood at this exact same location before the ownership changed. Any ownership change seems to have come from an insider to Caffé Trieste, as it’s more than just the outdoor [...]

To the uninitiated, CoffeeRatings.com might look more like a horse racing tip sheet than a coffee Web site. But there are very good reasons why we’ve gone through the effort to quantify things. Just look at the chaos that can ensue when you don’t follow a system nor a simple baseline set of evaluation criteria: [...]

The Cafe Noir that previously existed at this location made one of the best espresso shots you could buy in the Monterey area since around 2005. Unfortunately, it closed in early 2008, leaving this location vacant for a couple of months. Fortunately, its replacement, Café Lumeire, opened in April 2008 and has been more than [...]

This past weekend, the Sunday Herald (Scotland) published an article on Trieste, Italy and some its great cafés: A Shot In The Dark (from Sunday Herald). (Trieste is also home to illycaffè and the namesake for the local legend, Caffé Trieste.) The article touches on Caffè Tommaseo, the historic Caffè San Marco, Caffè Degli Specchi, [...]

This week, Citysearch.com announced that the votes have been tallied once again for their annual “Best Coffee” poll: Best of Citysearch San Francisco 2007 – Best San Francisco Coffee. And is there anything more effective than the annual readers poll for highlighting all the anomalies and flaws of open user review systems? I know I [...]

I’m a little slow this time around, but not long ago Citysearch.com announced their 2006 readers’ poll winners for the best coffee in San Francisco: Best of Citysearch San Francisco – Best San Francisco Coffee. This is something of an annual tradition, as we reviewed Citysearch’s 2005 coffee winners. (When you think of it, naming [...]

This newest location of the Bay Area chain is the sophisticated sister to the rest — perhaps a nod to the residential growth in SOMA as China Basin fills. A long, windowed, sidewalk-facing café with dark painted walls, dark wood furniture, elegant lamps, opera music, and plenty of stands selling coffee accessories: Moka pots, coffee [...]

This old school, Calabrian-themed Italian pastry shop once had a touch for good espresso under its longtime ownership. They owner had been using Graffeo beans religiously since 1985. However, by 2006 they switched to Lavazza beans and began making inferior espresso (though the two aren’t exactly cause-and-effect). I’ve been unable to confirm with certainty, but [...]

Yes, this is the San Francisco legend — a meeting place for writers of the 1950s Beat movement; where Francis Ford Coppola wrote the script for The Godfather; where espresso was first introduced to the West Coast in 1956. This café is rather old-school Italian to the core — one of the fewer and fewer [...]