If you only had the name to go on, you would never come here. Few of us would willingly consume a meal where the name suggests either high-fructose corn syrup wrapped in wax paper or Dustin Hoffman in drag. Mmmm… appetizing.

On top of that, virtually no one seems able to spell its name correctly: calling it Tootsie’s, with the possessive apostrophe. Of course, there are people who insist on using the imaginary possessive-form names of “Lucky’s” [sic] and “Nordstrom’s” [sic]. But the name of this place — as etched on its Web site and on its metal signage in front — is Tootsies (no apostrophe).

We might cut the owners a break, as their rather authentic Italian approach to food and drink — they even call themselves “autentica cafeteria italiana” — suggests something may have been lost in translation. This is a pretty serious café that highlights the food of Emila-Romagna and Puglia regions of Italy. But to add to the confusion, Emila-Romagna and Puglia are two regions nowhere near each other. Hence we suspect the influence of more than one owner. (We even tried to connect Tootsies to the English colloquialism for toes or feet, but Puglia is actually at the heel of Italy’s boot.)

It’s a courtyard café in the Stanford Barn, technically located in what’s called the Barn’s “Powerhouse”. There is outdoor patio seating among café tables and parasols that surround the brick building. Inside there are a few small café tables packed together in a tight space. They live up to their “autentica cafeteria italiana” aspirations through an Italian staff making salads, panini, and espresso.

For espresso, they use a two-group Elektra machine at the service window. With it and their Roman Danesi beans, they produce a shot with a deep, rich-looking, darker brown crema with some texture. It’s a modest-sized shot that’s potent, but not necessarily prominent. It has a well-blended and satisfying flavor of pepper, some tobacco, spices, herbs, and some sweetness — with nothing much more prominent than the other flavors. Served in Danesi logo cups — after your meal as they might (and should) suggest.

At Tootsies the name may be nonsensical, but the espresso — despite their dependence on imported coffee roasts — is pretty serious.

Read the review of Tootsies in Palo Alto.

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 is split between the café and market storefronts. The former has metal chairs and tables with set wine glasses, and the later offers a salad bar, coffee bar, and no seating whatsoever.

Using a two-group La Marzocco Linea (next to a Clover), they pull shots of Barefoot‘s The Boss blend — resulting in a swirled medium brown crema on a double shot (by default). The shot is very mellow and smooth, with a crema that’s well-integrated with the body of the espresso. Flavorwise, it has a mild pungency but surprisingly lacks any distinctive or strong flavors. Still, it’s a good mellow cup — and is surprisingly served in a real Dudson cup despite the lack of seating. (Though you can park yourself by the cocktail seating in the café next door.)

Read the review of Calafia Cafe & Market A-Go-Go in Palo Alto, CA.

You have got to be kidding us. A runner’s supply store with outstanding espresso — perhaps the best in town? You bet. And a big thanks to veteran San Jose Coffee Geek, Gary Hutchison, for publicizing this unusual discovery.

This place ran as an online-only store for several years before opening this physical location in the old Fine Arts theater in the Fall of 2008. Walk past the aisles of Lycra, and in the back by the running shoes, you’ll find a small espresso bar run by serious espresso enthusiasts.

They use beans from the small and local Moksha Coffee Roasting, who roasts beans for them around four times per week. The barista here (Don, ZombieRunner‘s co-owner) is very deliberate. We ordered the first shot of the day, and he took his time working out several shots just to make sure he got it right.

Using a two-group Rancilio HX machine, he employed what’s known as the “Weiss Distribution Technique” — which is an overly fancy term for stirring grounds with a stick, held steady inside the portafilter basket with a hollowed out yogurt cup, to ensure the evenness of an extracted espresso shot.

Don pulls careful espresso shots with a highly textured, mottled medium and dark brown crema: it has the dark colors and red speckling you expect from espresso done right. The crema is also rather full and thick, and it makes a shot that’s a true emulsion between liquid and solids. It has a potent aroma, a firm-but-not-heavy body, and a robust flavor of cloves and herbal pungency with some tobacco notes. There isn’t much sweetness in the shot, but it’s done so well you don’t miss it much.

They serve it in a double-walled Bodum glass — with an aperitif glass of sparkling water on the side. Great stuff. ZombieRunner is more than just a convenient place for good espresso; this is definitely worth the trip as an espresso destination. A new vacuum pot has also arrived for other brewing options.

Read the review of ZombieRunner.

This AP story ran across the wire yesterday: KOMO-TV – Seattle, Washington – Local & Regional – Coffee vendors teaching wholesale customers to brew’em right. It is about espresso training for the competitive professional market. Roasters such as Zoka Coffee Roaster & Tea Co. and Caffe D’Arte of Seattle have been successfully offering weekend training courses.

One of the training attendees mentioned in the article is a manager at Satura Cakes in Palo Alto and Los Altos. The location in Palo Alto is just across the street from Caffé del Doge — and may be something I’ll need to check out.

UPDATE: March 27, 2007
Today the Sydney Morning Herald published a related article on the barista training offerings in Australia: Lessons in lattes – Good Living – Entertainment – smh.com.au.

Thanks to a regular reader for recently tipping me off to this place.

This unusual café is unique for serving single estate coffees from Venezuela. They obtain their beans from their Arabica Coffee Company in Caracas (not to be confused with the American outfit) and run cafés here and in Beverly Hills. They have a restaurant-sized café space — with large patio seating in front, seating in the back before a fireplace and under a glass skylight, and inside seating along the main service area decorated with black & white photos of Venezuelan coffee estates.

They sell Venezuelan chocolates, lunch items, and plenty of coffee. They even offer a ristretto on the menu (reviewed here). Using a three-group UNIC Zi, they pull a shot with a mild aroma and a medium brown crema of lighter thickness with some striping. There’s a sharp pungency to the flavor that you would expect from a single estate espresso, but it’s not terribly potent for a ristretto. They are fairly good milk frothing as well — it tends to be dry, yet a strong coffee flavor comes through in their cappuccino (you can taste the coffee instead of just milk).

Read the review of Coupa Café (Palo Alto).

With my kitchen currently getting the bulldozer (i.e., reconstruction) treatment, home espresso operations have come to a screeching halt. What better time to forage for espresso? Last week I reported that Caffé del Doge opens in Palo Alto, and this morning I decided to pay a visit.

This chain of Venetian cafés opened in 2003 (thanks to poster, claudietta, for the corrections) and has since spread to areas as far and wide as Budapest, Buenos Aires, and Tokyo. This Palo Alto location opened in December 2005 in the same exact location as the former Torrefazione Italia, which is a great space for a quality coffee experience.

They haven’t changed the site’s layout much at all: great counter window seating, a casual place to lounge upstairs, and limited sidewalk seating. The only difference is that they made the tight walkway from front to back even worse by adding shelves of risotto, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, moka pots, and packaged and whole bean coffee. The walls are bright orange with large prints of Venice.

The café’s name is a reference to Venice’s traditional political leaders, elected by the elite, from about 700 A.D. until 1797. The staff wear Caffé del Doge T-shirts with the Specialty Coffee Association of Europe logo on the back, and there’s a real “Sons of Italy” expatriate feel here: native Italian speaking expats frequently chat it up with the manager as if needing to connect back home somehow. But make no mistake — this isn’t the Old World charm of Caffé Trieste. This is Palo Alto, where the homies literally pulled up at the nearby intersection, blasting the Bollywood hit parade out their car windows.

The café still uses dual two-group Elektras that suspiciously look like they have been left behind by the Torrefazione Italia that once stood here, except here they use multiple bean dispensers and Mazzer grinders to handle the variety. And what a variety! For espresso, they offer coffee bean choices of Rosso, Nero, Blue decaf (all $1.50) — and single origins in the form of base ($1.80), premium ($2.30), and gourmet ($3.50). Add 50% for a doppio. (The cappuccinos and macchiatos come in similar choices.)

Caffé del Doge is among the first wave of cafés in the Bay Area featuring multiple bean choices for your espresso — other notables being Café Organica and Santa Clara’s Barefoot Coffee Roasters. However, what I find particularly interesting is their choice of offering single bean espressos (for example, you often have to order “off the menu” for them at Café Organica).

The single bean espresso is an intensely Western (as in the Pacific Coast) concept, though rumor has it that owner Bernie Della Mea offers them even at his Venice locations. It’s a concept akin to single malt scotches — or more appropriately, monovitgno grappas. What qualities you might lose in the flavor balance of a blend (or crema, body, brightness, etc.), you might gain in rich intensities of certain characteristics. The cup might be a little one-dimensional, but the bolder qualities of a single blend might be just what you seek.

The Rosso blend is pretty straightfoward, with a healthy medium brown crema and a robusta balance in their BFG Porcellane cups (they use SchönhuberFranchi cups for their cappuccinos). Their gourmet single origin, the Galapagos San Cristobal Island™ when I visited, had a thinner, paler crema (which you’d expect in a single origin) and a touch more sweetness over the Rosso.

My favorite was their premium single origin: the Guatemala Huehuetenango San Pedro Necta®: a Slow Food Association collaboration with a (predictably) weaker crema but a brilliant, candy-like sweetness of roasted almonds and bright notes of cedar.

Read the review.

As for their milk-based drinks, the microfoam — much like their latte art — leaves room for improvement (the Torrefazione Italia here handled it far better). However, the milk flavor is quite good and rich.

In conclusion, while their espressos served from blends are pretty good, they aren’t necessarily leaps better than what you can find at the Starbucks down the street. However, their single origin espressos are particularly good, unusual, and highly recommended — they are well-worth the extra splurge over their blends. I’m actually a bit surprised that an overseas chain can pull single bean espressos that retain a great deal of the roast’s original intensity. They must pay a lot in expedited shipping, as these are characteristics that often fizzle out in transit despite vacuum sealing and other shipping precautions.

I’ve always said that Eton Tsuno of Café Organica is an espresso visionary. Now his, along with Santa Clara’s Barefoot Coffee Roasters, aren’t the only Bay Area cafés to be famous for offering a choice of coffee bean blends for your espresso.

As reported in today’s San Francisco Chronicle (Cetrella owner to bring chowder house to Half Moon Bay), there’s a new arrival in town: Caffé del Doge. Located at 419 University Ave. (near Waverly) in Palo Alto, this Venice, Italy-based coffee roaster and café supposedly offers ten or more different bean stock choices for your made-to-order espresso (a very New World take, that’s for sure). Taking the “Have It Your Way” mantra a step even further, this 50-seat café apparently handles a variety of orders of how you would like it prepared — including a series of coffee “cocktails”.

I’m more than familiar with Caffé del Doge. A little over a year ago, when I was last in Venice, I encountered their beans in a variety of restaurants and bars. However, the one thing I could not find all around town was a single branded Caffé del Doge café. Ironic that you can find one in Palo Alto and not Venice, isn’t it?

In fact, by most Italian standards, I found the espresso in Venice to be generally inferior — particularly when compared to most of what you can find in Roma or Napoli. Venetian baristas are often younger, transitional employees rather than the careerist professionals you might find elsewhere in Italy’s best cafés. And while Venice was once a very important coffee trading port with the East, a far better bet than their coffee is their grappa and amarone. (And I’m not even including the overpriced dreck they serve the tourists in the Piazza San Marco.)

As for Caffé del Doge, their coffee beans are pretty good. But I was not overly impressed. Perhaps the best coffee I found from my last travels there, and also popular with the few locals, came from a local roaster called Torrefazione India Caffé. You can find one of their bean & leaf stores (a true torrefazione that doesn’t serve retail beverages) in the Dorsoduro district on Campo Santa Margherita.

Thus Caffé del Doge isn’t necessarily the best coffee from an Italian region that, despite its history, is no longer regarded for its coffee. Then lose freshness by transporting the roasted beans half-way around the world… then serve them at a Caffé del Doge café here in Palo Alto (when they are no where to be found in their native Venice)…

When you put it in context, there doesn’t seem to be much of a real brand attraction other than the romantic notion that they come from Venice. So will I go over and check them out? You bet! I love pretending I’m in Venice as much as anyone, and I have the tazzina in my collection to prove it.