Opening in July 2011, this new coffeehouse expands Glen Park‘s neighborhood coffee offerings. It’s located a little off the beaten path, nearest a freeway exit from the Glen Park BART station. Outside they have a couple of sidewalk tables. Inside is a modern, semi-sterile interior of orange and gray walls and exposed chrome and stainless steel.

They proudly display the bios and details of their suppliers on the walls, from Mr. Espresso coffee to the two-group, chrome Faema E61 machine to the Grass Valley artist who made the Cup sculpture that overhangs the shop’s entrance outside. They also sell Mr. Espresso coffee beans with the Cup label stuck on the package.

Using their coffee and shiny E61 (and Mazzer and Macap grinders), they pull a very short shot with a potent, darker brown crema. It’s surprisingly not syrupy, given the pour size. It’s actually a little ballzy to make an espresso this short in this neighborhood, so kudos to them. It has a potent herbal flavor of cloves, etc., that’s missing a little top-end brightness in the cup. Their milk-frothing is decorative but unusual and on the thick side.

Maybe it isn’t as unique as having a Cafe Bello — which has long established its own unique flavor profile and style by locally roasting their own for a number of years. (Helping to fend off that espresso sameness issue.) And maybe the location isn’t perfect and the interior is a little sterile. But they still make a good espresso.

Read the review of Cup.

Last week we wrote about how coffee, like food, has become a primary form of consumer entertainment. We also mentioned recent experiences at newer coffee bars that have felt, well, “manipulative and artificial.” This concern over what seems real might sound trivial, but it’s at the foundation of a great deal of consumer behavior and marketing today.

Don’t believe us? Look at the immense popularity of reality television shows, the critical importance of reality to today’s video game industry, and the heavy emphasis of realness, or authenticity, in our food and drink. Social theorists suggest that our lives today are so consumed with virtual crap — crap that severs us from nature and self-sufficiency — that we now crave authenticity and reality in the things we do and the things we buy. Authors Joe Pine and Jim Gilmore heavily explored this theme in their book Authenticity: What Consumers Really Want.

Oakland’s Eat Real (?) Festival

Speaking of food and drink experiences that overtly express their realness, this past weekend we attended Oakland’s (recently) annual Eat Real Festival. Coffee featured at the event (more on that later), and the event Web site tells us, “Eat Real’s mission is to make real food as accessible and as affordable as fast food at events held in strategic communities across the United States.”

So, according to this food fest, what does real food actually mean? For one, no fewer than two separate kombucha demonstration sessions. For another, urban homesteading — with models of a backyard townhouse you can build for a chicken that’s the envy of many an East Oakland resident. And lots and lots of taco trucks. As if the mere act of serving food out of fad-friendly taco trucks makes it naturally affordable, nutritious, locally grown, and oh-so-real.

If we thought so many of our recent new coffee experiences were artificial, what could we make of the realness of this event? Planted smack in the middle of this festival was a McDonald’s-owned Chipotle booth. With over 22,500 employees at 1,000 locations in 36 states, you can bet your kombucha that Chipotle doesn’t raise their chickens in backyard townhouses.

The festival is the brainchild of Susan Coss and Anya Fernald, organizers behind the 2008 Slow Food Nation that we highly endorsed. That event may have received heavy, but misplaced, criticism for its “elitist” price tag at the time. While there’s nothing disingenuous about dressing up a county fair with more modern food fads, slapping the real or authentic label on it hops on the express lane to Phonytown. Pine & Gilmore write about three basic rules of authenticity, and the Eat Real Festival failed at all of them. The second rule being, “It’s easier to be authentic if you don’t say you’re authentic.” Remind you of any Third Wave flag wavers you know?

Coincidentally, a few blocks away was the 23rd annual Oakland Chinatown Streetfest where they offered no kombucha demonstrations, no taco trucks, and no Chipotle booth dressed in “I’m locally grown” clothing. Your guess as to which festival felt more real and authentic.

Coffee at the Eat Real Festival

Back to the coffee, Blue Bottle Coffee‘s James Freeman spoke about home coffee roasting at the event — focusing on his roasting roots with a basic oven (in other words: forget those newfangled popcorn poppers!).

Ritual Coffee Roasters established a presence with an event-suitable trailer-on-wheels — with La Marzocco GB/5 sticking out of one end. Going beyond our usual straight espresso shots, the cappuccino was decent but a far too milky for their usual standards.

Hands-down the most impressive coffee drinks at the festival grounds came from — surprise, surprise — Mr. Espresso. We’ve normally considered particularly fluffy espresso specialty drinks as superfluous barista competition fodder. But their Venezuelan Cappuccino — made with Mr. Espresso’s Neapolitan Espresso and Barlovento Venezuelan Hot Chocolate Truffle of “Star Anise, Orange zest, and All Spice berries” made believers out of us.

Established on this spot in 1955, Paolina’s operated as Carmel’s oldest running Italian restaurant for over 50 years. It was little more than a cafeteria-style indoor food counter, though they used a decorative, three-group, manual, brass eagle Rancilio machine with “Paolina’s” detailed on the back. The espresso may not have been memorable, but their machine certainly was.

Fast-forward to 2009: Paolina’s owners sold the business, the operators lost interest, and a new inhabitant took over. Carmel Belle — or just “Belle” at times, depending on the signage — promotes a heavy local and organic theme. They offer no dinner service and primarily serve breakfasts, soups, salads, and sandwiches with the “Carmel Belle-iefs: simple, fresh, local & organic = yummy”.

The young, fresh, and frugal set worship this place — almost irrationally so. The simple, basic quality of the goods here are definitely worth a visit. Just that it is nothing so special to fawn over, as many do, in this town with a lot of good food to boast.

For espresso service, they use a new, shiny two-group Faema Due at the counter. Their single espresso is served as a huge shot in a large Mr. Espresso-logo Nuova Point cup. It is truly a doppio.

Even so, it comes with a rich, congealed, mottled medium brown crema with lighter spots. And despite its size, it is not at all diluted or overextracted (a true double shot). The flavor may not be watery, but it is not very potent either. This could be due to the age of their bean stocks, even though the healthy crema suggests it is rather fresh.

It has a smooth flavor of some mild wood and spice. On the downside, the flavor is subtle enough to be lost if you add milk to it. Still, it’s one of the best shots in town.

Read the review of Carmel Belle in Carmel, CA.

Opening in April 2009 on the site of the former Eatcetera (they still retained their frozen yogurt machines), “eat” still seems the theme at this Financial District salad and panini shop. We’ve long been hoping for an Eataly to move into town, and this would barely cover their bathrooms. But it’s definitely an improvement over its previous resident.

It’s an open space with vast ceilings and signage climbing up the walls in back. For seating, they have a smaller area of modern stools and high tables. And they serve espresso: Mr. Espresso, in fact, from a two-group, old school Faema machine with Mr. Espresso branding.

They pull relatively large shots with a crema on the pale side, but it’s of a decent thickness. It has a stronger, potent flavor of pepper and tobacco, and it’s served in rare “Mr. Espresso Collection ’95″ Nuova Point cups. There are even large bags of Mr. Espresso beans for sale. A decent choice if you’re nearby and want something convenient that isn’t half-bad.

Read the review of L’Eataliano.

One of the things that the big coffee chains do well is consistency. Or at least that’s the conventional wisdom, lifted straight from the fast food chain playbook. A McDonald’s french fry is pretty much the same everywhere, and the coffee served at a big chain is little different. Or so we’ve all been told.

For example, a Long Island Press article cited in our last post quoted local roast master, Greg Heinz: “Starbucks does a lot of things very well. It maintains consistency nationwide.” The article’s author then later goes on to say, “Just like any chain, Starbucks cannot exist without uniformity.”

Or can it? We’ve always felt that the coffee quality can be quite erratic between one Starbucks and another. Lately we’ve been digging into the CoffeeRatings.com data we’ve collected over the years to validate some of our assumptions about coffee and quality. What we found supported our hunch that some of the biggest coffee chains are actually pretty lousy at consistency and uniformity.

Using our ratings data to measure quality consistency among cafés

Below is a table we’ve compiled by keying off some of the fields in our database from thousands of reviewed espresso shots. Each row represents the aggregate espresso shot reviews for a given chain, a given coffee roaster, a given espresso machine manufacturer, or a given cup manufacturer — reflecting a few choices we made for illustration.

Each row (or sample set) shows the number of cafés, high espresso score, low score, average score, median score, and standard deviation for all the associated ratings. For our consistency evaluation here, the key is the standard deviation — which is a simplistic measure of the spread in espresso scores for a given grouping.

For example, the first row represents all reviewed Starbucks. The data suggest that most reviewed Starbucks — about 68 percent, assuming a normal distribution — have an espresso rating score that’s within 1.05 rating points of the average for all Starbucks reviewed (here that’s 5.13).

Now compare this 1.05 with the other example rows in the table. For example, all reviewed Peet’s Coffee & Tea outlets have a standard deviation of 0.74. This suggests a much narrower variation in their espresso scores — and hence better consistency and predictability.

Coffee quality consistency among independent cafés can be stronger than within the big chains themselves

All reviewed cafés using Blue Bottle Coffee beans may have very different owners but score an even lower 0.70 standard deviation. These cafés may only share a bean supplier and some of standards for freshness and access to common consulting and training, but their espresso scores are significantly more consistent among each other than the cafés under a single Starbucks ownership — or even Peet’s.

Surely, a single quality dimension does not represent the breadth of possible flavor profiles, body weights, and crema textures that might also factor into a consistency analysis. But this data refutes the conventional wisdom that Starbucks, for example, provides a consistently dependable and uniform level of beverage quality. Even with their complete supply and delivery chain standardization, Starbucks fails to produce espresso quality that’s as consistent as a number of independent cafés that have only a coffee bean supplier in common.

Our data also suggests that the Starbucks brand is no better a determinant of quality consistency than whether the café uses a La Marzocco espresso machine or Delco cups. This is a critical point to understand, so let’s put this another way:

The Starbucks brand predicts consistency of espresso quality no better than if all the random cafés we surveyed that use Delco cups decided to re-brand themselves as “The Delco-branded Cups Coffeehouse chain.”

Given the investments Starbucks has made in coffee bean and roasting consistency, standardized push-button espresso machines, and standardized training, we don’t see how you can interpret this data as anything short of a complete failure for the company to deliver on the brand expectations of quality consistency.

If Starbucks’ consistency isn’t in their prepared coffee, then it is likely a psychological perception: the consumer’s brand association, the consistency of the Starbucks beverage menu, Starbucks’ own ridiculous names for drinks and their sizes, and the familiar environment of its coffee shops.

Seeking out chains in the hopes of managing risk

We recently came across a blog post by Chris Pirillo, a tech-geek/blogger/ex-TV-show-host who practically wet his underpants because he found a Peet’s Coffee & Tea chain store in his Sheraton Waikiki hotel. This when located in the very same building is an outlet of the Honolulu Coffee Company — which sources beans from Hawaii’s own Greenwell Farms, operates one of the few Mistral Triplette espresso machines in the world, and last scored as high as the best Peet’s we’ve ever been to anywhere. (Famed Baltimore coffee podcaster, Jay Caragay, disputes the quality there as dubious — but we stick by our last, albeit five-year-old, rating.)

Meanwhile, a friend in the Netherlands told us about a Starbucks that opened in Utrecht a week ago. When he passed by over the weekend, he said, “The line was unholy.” In a country where coffee shops legally sell marijuana by the menu, lines are out the door for one that peddles the double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato.

What makes people seek out mass-produced mediocrity over independent, higher quality options just as conveniently nearby? What made an old boss of mine seek out a Pizza Hut for dinner when we were in the heart of London together on business travel with time to kill? These questions are woven into why we started CoffeeRatings.com six years ago.

In the case of coffee, you can largely dismiss the argument that chains provide a convenient shorthand to take out the risk in quality versus an unknown. As our data suggests here, big coffee chains can be less consistent among themselves than independent cafés with a common coffee supplier are to each other.

This is the part of the article where we’re supposed to have a snappy, revelatory answer to these questions. But we’ve got nothin’ — other than the consumer comfort with big coffee chains likely says more about their environment and sales practices than it does about the quality of the actual products they sell.

Last month — after publishing a few trip reports of nearby Cole Coffee, the Spasso Coffeehouse, and Peaberry’s Coffee & Tea — Luigi DiRuocco of Mr. Espresso asked if we tried the espresso at Oliveto.

We last updated our review of Oliveto a couple years prior, so the focus of our most recent Rockridge tour was to explore some cafés we hadn’t evaluated before. However, Luigi pointed out that, last year, the downstairs Oliveto Cafe was entirely remodeled and that Mr. Espresso installed a beautiful, original Faema E61. We last saw one of these machines in operation at Cafe Noir in Monterey, CA four years ago — which has since been swapped out now that it is now known as Café Lumiere. (Curiously enough, the E61 at Cafe Noir was also installed by Mr. Espresso, so it could be the same machine.)

Luigi also mentioned that they did a new round of trainings for the Oliveto staff — a continual need that plagues any coffee roaster that sells to independent retail locations. And, simultaneously, Christian of Man Seeking Coffee fame contacted us with the idea of another joint review. Thus, Christian and I decided to check them out again this past weekend.

This restaurant has existed on this Rockridge corner since 1987, albeit in different forms. The latest generation is a higher end Italian restaurant upstairs with a popular trattoria/café downstairs. Downstairs there’s some rather limited outdoor seating, a number of wooden tables and chairs (which replaced the shared, long tables in their previous interior design), and meals that rely heavily on the simple organics. Upstairs it is white tablecloths and a more extensive menu — with the same espresso shots running about $0.50 more.

Using their older, two-group, Mr. Espresso-supplied Faema, they produced adequate results. While its replacement with an even older, more classic, three-group E61 Faema constitutes serious espresso machine eye candy, we were hoping some of the recent training would come through in the shots it produced.

They still pull shots with a thinner layer of dark brown crema. It’s more substantial than the shots they pulled with their previous machine (which often had a thin ring of light or medium-to-light brown crema). However, there still seems to be plenty of room for improvement. The body of the shot is thinner — it’s a touch watery even — with a flavor more of pungent herbs than the previous mild spice and wood flavors here. The finish is subtly sharper, but it’s still not nearly as bright as you would expect of a well-made espresso.

Some readers here can make the (logical) conclusion that we’re huge fans of Mr. Espresso, given our ratings of places such as Coffee Bar. More accurately, given the inconsistency of preparation that so plagues roasters, we are much bigger fans of Luigi’s barista skills with Mr. Espresso beans than anything else. While it was a decent cup, we found Oliveto’s improvement over their previous shots to be marginal. (Rumor has it, however, that daytime shifts during weekdays may produce better results.)

Served in traditional brown, thick-walled Nuova Point cups with a modest pour size. Oliveto is also one of those few places that offer to top off your empty espresso cup with filter coffee at brunch, which we don’t particularly mind.

Read the updated review of Oliveto Cafe & Restaurant.

Opening last month on the site of a former Briazz prepared-foods (lunch, primarily) chain shop, this corner café isn’t much of a leap from its predecessor. They serve sandwiches, soups, and salads as before — but with an emphasis on cocoa and espresso.

The store seeps causes from its signage: Fair Trade coffee and cocoa, Clover organic milk, etc. Yet that’s the required price of entry for doing business in SF these days: unless your front door bleeds feel-good causes, you have not justified why you’ve chosen to offend the public by opening a for-profit business in town. Even if said causes are more platitude-driven, high-gloss window dressing than substance (energy-inefficient polluting recycling or coal-burning electric cars, anyone?).

In addition to a wall of prepared foods and a central counter with a small, two-group E91 Faema Diplomat machine, there’s seating along the corner windows and some outdoor searing along Sutter St. at café tables. Deep in its recesses are the free Internet junkies on laptops, banished to the corner with power cords dangling from the ceiling.

In making a shot from Mr. Espresso beans, the barista is slow, careful, and deliberate. The resulting cup has a mottled, textured, medium-brown crema of average thickness, but it congeals rather richly. The shots also run on the short side, served in black ACF cups. Despite all that, it is relatively lacking in flavor. There’s no real “punch” to the shot; it has a tepid, mellow flavor of mild spices. Somehow they manage to serve a shot with a proper size and a promising crema that doesn’t quite live up to your expectations.

Read the review of Bread & Cocoa.

Today’s San Jose Mercury News ran a nice, local puff news piece today on the Di Ruocco family, of Mr. Espresso fame: Di Ruocco family crafts coffee with care – San Jose Mercury News.

The fluffy article documents some of the background behind Carlo Di Ruocco, who founded Mr. Espresso over 30 years ago because he couldn’t find a decent espresso to drink in the area. (We can sympathize: it was bad enough just a decade ago.) Mr. Di Ruocco’s Mr. Espresso also became a licensed Fair Trade Certified roaster in 1999 — or more than seven years before whiny college students, who now militantly insist upon Fair Trade, even heard of the stuff. (So there.)

We last met Mr. Di Ruocco at the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity Coffee Presidia tasting — at his son Luigi’s Coffee Bar. It’s great seeing local legends still very active in the area’s coffee community.

This French bakery and café resides across the street of a parking garage in a roadside “strip mall” of sorts. It’s in a very odd part of the city that consists of modern-yet-plain software company office buildings clustered together. Imagine if SF opened a theme park based on downtown San Jose, and you get the idea. (Can a downtown-San-Jose-themed Las Vegas casino be far behind?)

Chef and namesake co-proprietor of Pâtisserie Philippe, Philippe Delarue, of Le Mans, France, makes some serious French pastries here — including macarons and many meringues of pastel colors. (As a French bakery, they do a great job.) They also serve salads, croissants, and cookies.

The walls are covered with color photos of pastries and framed mirrors. Along a long, windowed storefront, they’ve laid out a few nice wood and black marble café tables. There are (faux) flowers and, of course, the obligatory large café au lait bowls to be found about.

Using a two-group E-91 Ambassador Faema supplied by Mr. Espresso (they also use their beans), they produce a rather delicate espresso with a thinner layer of darker brown crema. It has a sweet aroma, a good body from its appropriate size, and there’s a little bite at the end of the finish from a cup that has a robust spice and herbal pungency to its flavor. They serve it in a short, cylindrical demitasse.

This is no French espresso. And on CoffeeRatings.com, that’s a compliment: it’s actually quite good.

Read the review of Pâtisserie Philippe.

This café sits on the south side of Geary Blvd.’s viaduct/quasi-freeway exit, west of Masonic Ave. There’s a Denny’s-esque wall of curved glass that creates an almost greenhouse-like front enclosure, but you need to enter this small space by walking down the narrow passageway just past it.

Inside there’s a colorful interior with several café tables and color photos from world travels on the walls. They offer panini, free Wi-Fi, and friendly neighborhood staff — and a loyal neighborhood following.

Using a two-group Mr. Espresso Rancilio machine, they pull espresso shots with an even, slightly thin layer of medium brown crema. It tastes smoky and pungent — generally pleasant, though it is not altogether very potent. Served in classic thick-walled brown ACF cups.

Read the review of Nani’s Coffee.