Posted by TheShot on 21 Aug 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Local Brew, Restaurant Coffee
Four years ago we posted about our disappointment over high-end restaurants that offered plenty of options for tea but only one for coffee. It’s as if these celebrated houses of distinguished taste decided that coffee had all the nuance and variety of unleaded gasoline — and it showed in the product they served. And when [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 01 Apr 2010 | Tagged as: Barista, Consumer Trends, Quality Issues, Restaurant Coffee
The Annual SCAA Exposition is upon us. This month — in addition to the usual gadget marketing, major sponsorship from suspect brands, and the U.S Barista Championship — the event organizers have added a new Culinary Track: SPECIALTY COFFEE ASSOCIATION ADDS CULINARY TRACK | Articles | Beverages. To quote the SCAA press release [pdf, 27kb]: [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 19 Feb 2010 | Tagged as: Beans, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew, Restaurant Coffee
It’s the kind of statement sure to earn protests from many a New Yorker: some consider Yountville, CA to be the culinary capital of America. An outrageous assertion? Not necessarily. At the heart of the Napa Valley wine country, Yountville is home to what many call the nation’s greatest restaurant in The French Laundry. It [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 30 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Café Society, Local Brew, Restaurant Coffee
Opening in early 2009, this is an unusual space in that most people cannot make it out: “Is it a café? Is it an event space? Is it a restaurant? Is it a wine bar?” Well, it’s all of the above inside an old, long, barn-like structure across from the diploma factory California Culinary Academy [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 22 Oct 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Home Brew, Local Brew, Restaurant Coffee, Roasting
San Rafael-based Equator Estate Coffees has long been a major enigma for us. They have heavy distribution among high-end restaurants in town — and quite a few on the low-end. But despite the occasional accolades among tastemaker chefs, we just didn’t “get it.” Over the years, we sampled the espresso at well over 30 different [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 27 May 2009 | Tagged as: Barista, Beans, Machine, Quality Issues, Restaurant Coffee, Roasting
We are not the only ones who have lamented the sorry state of restaurant coffee — particularly at some of the Bay Area’s finest restaurants. The San Francisco Chronicle made poor restaurant coffee a front-page headline as early as 1963. In some ways, the elevated coffee standards that exist outside of the restaurant world are [...]
[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 12 Mar 2009 | Tagged as: Beans, Local Brew, Quality Issues, Restaurant Coffee, Roasting
Must be a light news day for the SF Chronicle to pull out an evergreen story like this today: Exploring our love of the bean from the grounds up. But while the Chronical [sic] has published up to 70% of the material in previous articles, the article provides a worthy (albeit brief) examination of SF’s [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 28 Aug 2008 | Tagged as: Café Society, Local Brew, Machine, Roasting
With little fanfare, last week Four Barrel Coffee finally graduated out of the ranks of the Malaysian street food experience and opened up its formal café space. So this week we paid a visit to check out the new digs — and update our espresso review. (See: our previous Four Barrel Coffee Trip Report.) Last [...]
[view full post]Posted by TheShot on 24 Aug 2008 | Tagged as: Barista, Café Society, Foreign Brew, Local Brew, Quality Issues, Restaurant Coffee
Regular readers here are familiar with our squawking about Slow Food in this blog for almost three years now. You might even recall our pilgrimage to the Slow Food mothership in Bra, Italy last October. But in case you haven’t seen the orange and black posters everywhere, next weekend Slow Food comes to America for [...]
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