Posted by TheShot on 08 May 2009 | Tagged as: Foreign Brew, Local Brew
This split café and to-go market is founded by Chef Charlie Ayers, famous for catering for the Grateful Dead (as evidenced by the large wall photo inside) and the initial food operations at Google. This place is his attempt to make his Google cafeteria “public.” It has limited outdoor table and picnic bench seating. Inside [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 23 Apr 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Machine, Restaurant Coffee
Esquire magazine named this place 2008 Restaurant of the Year (among new restaurants). The same Nov. 2008 issue also crowned Dominique Crenn, executive chef at SF’s excellent-but-underappreciated Luce, as 2008′s Chef of the Year. While L2O is a pretty fabulous restaurant, calling it the year’s best is debatable. However, there’s no question this is a [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 22 Jan 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Machine, Starbucks
Introduction Here at CoffeeRatings.com, we prefer to be experimentalists rather than theorists. This means we may have opinions, but we try to back them up with first-hand experience — even if it means consuming coffee, Fear Factor-style, that we would much rather avoid. Last year when Starbucks announced they were purchasing The Coffee Equipment Company, [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 31 Dec 2008 | Tagged as: Foreign Brew, Machine, Quality Issues
The year 2008 wasn’t about to end without a couple of newsworthy coffee notes. First, we have Chicago’s Intelligentsia banning coffee urns at their Broadway St. mothership: Intelligentsia on Broadway banishes urn coffee | The Stew – A taste of Chicago’s food, wine and dining scene. Earlier this year, we reported on how they killed [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 18 Oct 2008 | Tagged as: Barista, Consumer Trends, Quality Issues
This week we came across a curious video published by Voice of America: VOA News – Seattle: Capital of Coffee Houses. If you wonder why something called “Voice of America” produces video, you’ll question that even more after viewing this parody of a 1980′s corporate training video. But the video is essentially a review of [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 01 Sep 2008 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Fair Trade, Quality Issues
It is Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. And the only thing keeping us from inaugurating Itching Man, our long-proposed rival event to Burning Man, was Slow Food Nation ’08. For a little background, we mentioned this event in a post last week. Given how it had been billed, we had hopes there would be [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 26 Jul 2008 | Tagged as: Café Society, Restaurant Coffee
Foodie rag gone online, Saveur.com, recently published a series of coffee-themed articles in conjunction with the SCAA. One of the articles lamented American restaurants’ continued one-dimensional treatment of coffee: Nothing ‘Regular’ About It – Saveur.com. “‘Regular’ coffee?! The appetizer alone rated five adjectives,” writes reporter Jim Munson. We’ve expressed this very same lament here a [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 24 Jun 2008 | Tagged as: Consumer Trends, Roasting, Robusta
Today Condé Nast posted an general consumer article on what to look for in good coffee: Coffee Drinking Guide – Portfolio.com. However, it reads more as a quick guide to following what’s “trendy” today — rather than as a guide to seeking good quality coffee experiences. (Not to mention that the article’s title, “Eat Sheet: [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 14 May 2008 | Tagged as: Beans, Local Brew, Restaurant Coffee, Roasting
Today the SF Chronicle posted an impressively long article on the state of quality coffee roasting in the Bay Area: ROAST WITH THE MOST / A new generation of Bay Area coffee roasters pushes the perfect cup to the next level. It’s a remarkable piece, given its breadth. It lightly touches on everything from the [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 26 Apr 2008 | Tagged as: Beans, Foreign Brew, Quality Issues, Restaurant Coffee
Before we start reviewing the espresso in India, it’s about time we wrap things up on our recent coffee excursion to Hawaii’s Big Island. Hawaii is the only coffee-growing state of the Union (as they say: sorry, Puerto Rico is a territory), which makes it a uniquely American place to both sample the local espresso [...]
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