Two years ago, when we first encountered this café chain on Via Garibaldi in Torino, Italy, we had no idea how few of them exist. For one, turns out it was the only one in all of Italy. For another, there is only a dozen of them in the world. Oddly, four of them are in Chicago — three more than any other city.

This one is located next door to the historical Drake Hotel. Inside it is a modern café vehicle for promoting Lavazza coffee, right on down to the Lavazza retailing and the modern photographic artwork on the walls suggestive of their annual commercial art calendar. It’s a spacious and modern café that also offers a number of edibles.

The not-very-competent barista serves espresso shots from a three-group Faema Stylema, and the resulting cup is a bit tall with a thinning medium brown, even crema. It’s a little thin-bodied and on the stale side: the herbal Lavazza flavor here is more residual and subdued than anything up front on your taste buds

However, they do exhibit rather decent milk frothing and microfoam, which is better than the brewing standards here. We therefore recommend the cappuccino over the espresso here. But curiously enough, the receipt for our cappuccino said “no flavor” on it. We surmised that was a statement about the lack of syrupy additives, but the alternate interpretation of the phrase isn’t too far off either.

Read the review of Espression by Lavazza at The Drake Hotel on Chicago’s Gold Coast.

If Peet’s Coffee & Tea has been a slow-growth contrast to Starbucks‘ cancerous proliferation in recent years, Intelligentsia‘s expansion has been deliberately glacial. And why not? You get big, you get less selective about your coffee growers and suppliers. You start accepting employees with fewer skills and less passion about truly good coffee. And how’s a budding barista champion supposed to develop in that environment?

Intelligentsia’s Millennium Park location in Chicago is just their fourth installment; they now have three in Chicago and one in Los Angeles. Inside, there’s a bit of space — it’s a modern space compared with their other locations. But little of the floorspace is dedicated to seating: it’s mostly a wall display of colorful bags of roasted coffee, a few tables along one edge of the floor plan, and a relatively generous-sized serving area for those preparing coffee.

Using dueling orange, three-group La Marzocco FB70s, they pull short espresso shots with a richly textured, medium-to-dark brown crema of modest thickness. It has an intensely robust aroma, with a sweet flavor of molasses and almost syrup-like qualities. Definitely lives up to the Intelligentsia standard. And yes, they also have a Clover and feature the roasted single origin varietals for it.

Read the review of Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea at Millennium Park.

On the heel’s of Chicago’s informal crowning as America’s caffeine capital, today’s Chicago Tribune published an article that provided a light, unscientific, comparative review of 32 different take-out coffee offerings in the Chicago area: Know your Joe — chicagotribune.com. Instead of the single espresso, the yardstick used at CoffeeRatings.com, the Tribune based their evaluations on the 12-ounce house blend drip coffee.

The top finishers in their analysis included the following:

• Metropolis Coffee Co.
• Intelligentsia
• Coffee Beanery Ltd.
• Allegro at Whole Foods
• Illy
• Peet’s Coffee
• Julius Meinl

Every once in a while I have the privilege of visiting some place else. Eventhough American cities are becoming more and more homogenized, not everything is a Starbucks. When it comes to espresso, Chicago has a few notable exceptions that I experienced this year.

Intelligentsia

One of the finest roasters east of Seattle, Intelligentsia even supplies the coffee for Canada’s world-class Caffè Artigiano. Few in the Bay Area realize their preeminent status as a roaster when they saddle up to any one of the Specialty’s Cafe & Bakery chains. Probably because Intelligentsia coffee in the hands of Specialty’s staff and equipment is like putting a cello in the hands of Tim McGraw.

Thankfully, Intelligentsia exhibits the clasically trained approach with their coffee at their very own cafés, with one located downtown on Jackston Street and the original café on Broadway Street in the Lakeside District.

The downtown location is inside the historic Monadnock Building, which is complete with a classic dark wood interior adorned with cool retro espresso machine posters.

As for the espresso, it’s some of the best in the U.S.: highly-skilled baristas use beautiful La Marzocco machines to pull a short, potent, but sweet espresso like you may have never had east of Seattle. Certainly one of the best aromas I’ve had off a cup anywhere.

Read the review.

Equally worth a visit is their original Lakeview/Broadway St. location, where their methodical approach to great espresso is even more pronounced … and espresso lovers seem to pack it in all day long. (Read the review.)

Metropolis Coffee Company

Perhaps the only other Chicago area roaster/café worth writing home about is the Metropolis Coffee Company, far up north in the Lakeview District. Sure, the decor is a little worn and the coffee aesthetics could be better, but the espresso is great and it’s a lively literary scene. (And given what everyone will likely be reading, bring your Che Guevara T-shirt for bonus points with the locals.)

Read the review.

Lavazza

Illy no longer seems to be the “in” thing for pre-packaged coffee that Europhiles and restaurants like to brag about these days. That trendy crown — both here and in Rome, mind you — has gone to Torino, Italy’s Lavazza.

Just in time for the 2006 Winter Olympic Games in Torino (a grossly underrated city, btw, and one of my favorite escapes from tourists when in Italy), Lavazza has brought their high-end chain café concept to the U.S. this year. Modeled after the original Lavazza Caffè, the excellent San Tommaso café in Torino, the decor of these chains brings a modern industrial chic to the States.

As always, here: so what about the coffee? Well, some coffee lovers in the know will tell you that Lavazza strikes people as an “either-or” taste — you either like it or you don’t. I’m one of the few coffee snobs that falls in the “like it” camp — at least for pre-packaged coffee.

That said, I’m not impressed with the standards at this Chicago café — as I’ve had arguably better espresso from their beans in San Francisco at the humblest of places. More concerning is that I expected their standards to improve after reviewing them soon after they first opened. Yet upon my revisit earlier this week, I found their espresso to be more watery and less flavorful than before.

Read the review.

Well, I suppose that won’t necessarily stop the trend mavens from accessorizing with the Lavazza logo.

Happy New Year, all!