We’ve been lamenting the sorry state of restaurant coffee in these pages since 2005. But let it be known that, as of this moment forward, we have officially given up on the possibility of ever being reliably served good coffee in American restaurants.

Sure, there have been a few successes and battles won along the way. There has even been the occasional restaurant that made us think about what’s possible. But reliably good coffee — the way you can safely expect at any restaurant in, say, Portugal — is a pipe dream. We’ve finally come to the stark realization that the war is effectively unwinnable … a lost cause. To deny this is to blindly ignore an overwhelming display of evidence.

Oddly, the bit of news that finally killed the dream for us — what finally broke the camel’s back — was a post in the New York Times about Nathan Myhrvold’s Modernist Cuisine five-volume encyclopedia set and Mark Prince’s review of its coffee chapter on CoffeeGeek.com. We’ll explain in a moment.

Restaurants’ running coffee joke

Bad restaurant coffee has been the norm long, long before many of us were even born. There are even front-page references to this topic in the San Francisco Chronicle going back to 1963. Among long-anticipated social revolutions that ain’t never gonna happen, this places reliably good restaurant coffee somewhere between professional soccer making it big in the U.S. and the coming of the Jewish Messiah.

So what about those two articles triggered such absolute futility about restaurant coffee? Both pieces were written with a kind of presumptuous expectation that quality coffee somehow deserves a place in the discussion of “modernist cuisine.” As much as we love coffee, the idea is both audacious and completely misplaced. Located in Volume 4 of the series (“Ingredients and Preparation”), the coffee chapter follows a roughly equivalent chapter on wine. And that’s where the comparisons begin to fall apart.

When wine, beer, cheese, and even salt have a lot more to do with cuisine than coffee

It is not even a question that coffee is far less relevant to cuisine than wine. Coffee may have far more aromatic and flavor components than wine, but it can never be paired to complement food the way wine can. The world is steeped with centuries-old culinary traditions of pairing local wines with the food of the region. And yet in the many centuries that coffee cultures have had to pair coffee with cuisine, to this date the combination simply does not exist the world over — despite the many failed, recent attempts to shoehorn them together. This is not by accident.

Beer pairings, for example, are far more relevant to cuisine; we received no fewer than two beer pairings as part of a recent tasting menu at Atelier Crenn. And yet there’s no beer chapter in Modernist Cuisine. The same is even true for the modern phenomenon of pairing food with different varieties of salt. Thus this leaves coffee no more relevant and integral to the science of actual cuisine than, say, tea, after-dinner cordials, or even cigars or tobacco. None of which either have chapters in Modernist Cuisine, by the way.

We can make all sorts of excuses about the coffee in restaurants — such as how the “last mile” in the serving chain for coffee is far more technical and sensitive than that for serving tea or wine. But even if you solve that last mile problem, that doesn’t change coffee’s very limited relevance to cuisine overall. And the less relevant coffee is to cuisine, the less relevant good coffee becomes to the overall restaurant experience.

And the award for best supporting culinary actor again goes to … wine!

This might come as a slap in the face to a number of coffee professionals who are riding a revolutionary wave in coffee consumerism. (Note that we deliberately didn’t call it a revolution in coffee.) In the past decade, some have even envisioned the role of the barista on the same pedestal that food television bestows upon celebrity chefs — or at least the expectation of rivaling the wine sommelier.

This belief is fed by a steady stream of people selling coffee technology and pitching media stories inspired by the major changes in coffee consumerism. All of which has given modern coffee a little bit of an egotistical head case — an occasional sense of entitlement to a rightful place in the pantheon of restaurant gods alongside pedestals for wine pairings, cheese courses, and dessert menus.

But baristas aren’t at all like chefs, and that’s a good thing. (If anything, they’re a bit more like line cooks.) Baristas aren’t like sommeliers either, and that’s also probably a good thing. Specialization exists in a modern society for good reason: we don’t want our mixologists making our pork belly, and we really don’t want waiters and host/esses pulling our espresso shots. And just as head chefs rely on sommeliers and pastry chefs, we honestly don’t want our chefs obsessing over our coffee service.

Either play by coffee’s rules, or we don’t play at all

The SCAA conference’s “Culinary Track” is one of the better examples of how distorted the coffee industry views itself within the culinary world’s hierarchy of needs. The SCAA might partner with the Texas Restaurant Association for its annual conference in Houston at the end of this month, but it is still as if the SCAA expects Mohammad to come to the mountain — not the other way around (i.e., establishing a coffee track at a restaurateur conference, such as done at Fancy Food shows).

For each annual industry conference for tea, aperitifs, cordials, cheese, and salumi, does the SCAA expect that restaurateurs will take time out from their relentless schedules to attend a restaurateur-dedicated culinary track at each of these events? Is coffee so egotistical as to believe that it is entitled to a role more prominent than any of its sister components to an overall restaurant meal?

The future fate of restaurant coffee

CoffeeGeek’s legendary Mark Prince may have gotten excited by reading Modernist Cuisine‘s slagging of restaurant coffee standards, but there is absolutely nothing modern about this phenomenon. General consumer standards for coffee may have improved over the past decade, but restaurants on this continent are forever doomed to be laggards for the reasons outlined above. It’s a pattern that has persisted for decades.

Why it has taken us this long to write off restaurant coffee as a second-class culinary citizen is a bit of a mystery. But like everyone else, it’s time to get over it. Reliably good restaurant coffee will never happen. Not in our lifetimes. And probably not ever. And the sooner we can stop pretending that coffee is some elite offshoot of the culinary arts, the better.

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 we are buying unleaded gasoline, we at least get the typical options of regular, plus, premium, and/or ultra. So establishments known for their shotgun-wielding maître d’s and their counter displays of beef jerky actually beat out our nation’s finest restaurants in this regard.

Fast forward to today, and our finest restaurants have evolved little. However, this week we did have an experience that suggested at least some improvements are coming from retail coffeeshops. While seeking out some roasted beans at the Blue Bottle Cafe to share for pour-over this weekend, their Ethiopian Amaro Gayo caught my eye enough to purchase a half pound. Their response to my purchase request: “Washed or natural?”

Washed or natural!? What delightful music to this coffee lover’s ears. Now there will be those inevitable coffee consumers who will react to such a question with we-all-drank-Maxwell-House-in-my-day-and-that-was-good-enough-for-us uppity disdain. Not unlike the way some have made a hobby out of ranting over drink sizes named grande or venti — or being asked whether they liked a dry or wet cappuccino. But I was pleasantly surprised with the option to purchase essentially the same coffee with two different forms of processing (prior to roasting).

Which isn’t to suggest that there aren’t reasonable limits to the amount of preciousness we pour into our coffees. Reading the descriptors on Blue Bottle Coffee Web site (washed, natural), we can’t be sure whether we’re buying coffee or hallucinogens that provide us with a gateway to Total Recall. Reading the coffee’s descriptors from NY’s Gimme! Coffee (washed, sun-dried/natural) or Denver’s Novo Coffee (washed, sun-dried/natural), we get the impression that gender politics must taste better than the coffee itself.

Even with all that over-earnest prose, we’ll take the lump sum as an improvement.

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]:

SCAA’s Culinary Track is specifically designed to cater to the needs of gastronomic professionals, to guide them towards creating an exceptional specialty coffee menu or perfecting their existing beverage programs.

Big annual conferences are like sharks: if they don’t continue to move forward, they risk dying. After regular attendees have fatigued on Ron Popeil wannabes hawking their revolutionary coffee service inventions, and their umpteenth lather-rinse-repeat cycle of a highly routinized and somewhat arbitrary barista competition, conference organizers need to regularly introduce new blood and new ideas to keep it relevant. Enter the culinary track.

We’ve long lamented the sorry state of restaurant coffee and espresso — particularly in some of the nation’s finest dining establishments. So any legitimate attempt to improve the quality of restaurant coffee should be a good thing, right?

The Field of Coffee Dreams: If you create a conference track, they will come

But here’s the root of the problem and why this move is a big FAIL: this is a coffee conference, not a culinary conference. If you want to spread the gospel of good coffee, you need to take it to the chefs and restaurateurs. You don’t expect them to come to you. Chefs and restaurateurs, working ridiculous restaurant hours, already have too many conferences that they can reasonably attend before running off to Anaheim to hang with a bunch of coffee nerds.

As a result, this effort will do little to attract the culinary world to coffee. Instead, this track will do far more to attract the coffee world to the culinary arts. And when that happens, we get worried. We get results such as ridiculous coffee pairing dinners — which have always made about as much sense to us as cigar pairing with each course.

This fear is echoed in the retail food service article cited up top:

And this year, show organizers are adding a new Culinary Track designed specifically for foodservice and culinary professionals looking to create synergy in their food and beverage programs.

Oh no, not synergy. Not starry-eyed baristas who envision the monotonous gyrations of barista competitions somehow becoming enjoyable fodder for food television. Not another overreaching extension of coffee’s misguided wine analogy — where coffee professionals hope to ride the faux glamor of the culinary world’s coattails, selling out the very things that make coffee special and unique in the process.

And then there’s “cooking with coffee” — another topic that makes us cringe. One of our biggest complaints about coffee books of yore were the pages and pages of coffee recipes. If you need a recipe, it’s not coffee. We could tear out the last half of many of these old coffee book classics and never miss them. Look no further than the coffee stout: what was supposed to be the perfect marriage between beer and coffee has amounted to the embarrassing shotgun wedding of the beverage world.

If we really are serious about educating the culinary world about good coffee, support your local restaurateurs who get it. Demand better standards from the many who don’t get it. Just be true to yourself: don’t pretend to be something else than you already are.

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 also boasts a number of great chefs in the area — from Thomas Keller to Richard Reddington to Michael Chiarello (aka Top Chef: Masters‘ second-place winner).

But unlike New York City, Yountville is an odd town that spends most of its time pretending to be somewhere else — making it more like Las Vegas in this regard. Rather than celebrating the unique qualities of the Napa Valley that surrounds it, Yountville practically tells its visitors that they would rather be in France or Italy.

Welcome to Yountville: Please Hold Your Nose and Pretend We’re Provence™

For example: the Bordeaux House hotel, odes to Provence in the Maison Fleurie and Vintage Inn hotels, streets such as Burgundy Way, and restaurants such as Bistro Jeanty and the aforementioned French Laundry. Is it France? The Vintage Inn Web site even leads with the promotion: “The most romantic week we ever spent in Provence…was the one that we spent…in Yountville.”

Or take the Italian themes of of the Villagio Inn & Spa, the Tuscan villa of Hotel Luca, Cantinetta Piero, and Chiarello’s Bottega restaurant. Is it Italy?

My mother-in-law lived in “downtown” Yountville in the early 1960s, right on Mulberry St.. Back then, Yountville was covered with fields. You could go an entire day without hearing a car go by. In the Napa Valley, wine was still more than a decade away from being any sort of notable business — let alone a cultural phenomenon. So when life in the sticks gave way to romanticized images of vineyards and exquisite restaurants, Yountville responded with aspirations of class and culture through faux Eurotrash associations.

Perhaps train yards, mills, and Wappo Native Americans don’t carry the same elitist class as Europe’s famous wine-growing regions. But playing a schizophrenic, second-rate imitation of Europe isn’t very convincing either. This copycat behavior mirrors what many in the coffee industry have been doing by shoehorning coffee as a second-rate substitute for wine.

What happens to espresso in a food-obsessed town without any chain coffee shops?

Which brings us to the point of this post: the coffee. In Carmel-by-the-Sea we asked the question, “What happens to coffee in a town that bans Starbucks?” Here in Yountville, we asked the same question — but with the additional angle of being surrounded by this town’s notable food & wine credentials. In a town celebrated for its high cuisine, will the local standards for espresso improve at the local restaurants and cafés?

When it comes to espresso, American restaurants have always had a horrible track record. But like Carmel, we found that some of the best espresso in Yountville came from its restaurants. Unlike Carmel, we found the baseline standards for espresso to be generally decent overall.

That’s not to say that Yountville is without its surprising duds. Thomas Keller may be a fabulous chef, but his standards for serving coffee are rather poor given everything else he serves. We’ve written previously about some of the more cop-out choices they made for The French Laundry, but our recent test results of the espresso at his Ad Hoc were outright unacceptable.

Bardessono and the Yountville Coffee Caboose both represent places that looked to some of the Bay Area’s most famous roasters to raise the the bar. And although their preparation standards aren’t entirely up to par, they are good enough.

Not all imports are bad, however…

More noteworthy is Michael Chiarello’s Bottega restaurant. While the place exudes the kind of singles pickup scene you’d normally find in a bar serving Jägermeister shots along SF’s Union St., there’s no questioning how serious they are about their espresso.

Bottega sports a two-group lever Bosco machine at the bar — only the third one we know of in the entire greater Bay Area — and coffee beans from Seattle’s Caffé Vita (perhaps America’s chief supplier of Bosco machines). This kind of espresso pedigree is anything but a casual or accidental decision. It’s particularly surprising given the clientele: all that effort seems lost on so many naïve customers. We literally saw customers send back their menu order of the “whole fish” in disgust because they had never seen a fish served with a head and tail on it before.

Coincidentally, our Yountville hotel room offered a Nespresso Essenza C100 machine. Every time we tried to make espresso with their Roma capsules (the least foul of the lot), we could not get over how much it literally smelled like tuna.

Name	Address	Espresso [info]	Cafe [info]	Overall [info]	Last Reviewed
Ad Hoc	6476 Washington St.	4.20	5.50	4.850	2/14/2010
Bardessono	6526 Yount St.	7.70	7.80	7.750	2/13/2010
Bottega	6525 Washington St.	7.60	7.50	7.550	2/13/2010
Bouchon	6534 Washington St.	6.60	7.20	6.900	2/13/2005
Bouchon Bakery	6528 Washington St.	6.00	7.20	6.600	12/13/2005
Cantinetta Piero	6774 Washington St.	6.80	7.00	6.900	2/12/2010
Cups & Cones	6525 Washington St.	6.20	7.00	6.600	2/13/2010
French Laundry, The	6440 Washington St.	6.10	7.50	6.800	12/12/2006
Yountville Coffee Caboose	6523 Washington St.	7.10	7.00	7.050	2/13/2010

]]> http://theshot.coffeeratings.com/2010/02/yountville-espresso/feed/ 2 38.4015781 -122.3608105 http://theshot.coffeeratings.com/2009/10/horatius-potrero-hill/ http://theshot.coffeeratings.com/2009/10/horatius-potrero-hill/#comments Fri, 30 Oct 2009 17:24:02 +0000 TheShot http://theshot.coffeeratings.com/?p=4098

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 (CCA) across the street.

There’s some sidewalk seating in front of the space with more of a café space just inside — with flat-panel TV screens overhead, Portuguese cookbooks for sale, and a bit of Ritual coffee on display.

In the back, past the wine bar at the side and near the food and pottery items, is a space that is used as a Portuguese restaurant at night with projection movies. Decent Portuguese fare is hard to come by in these parts despite over a century of immigrants around the Bay: it seems you either have to get it at Tia Maria’s (short for: a Portuguese relative’s home) or down in San Jose along Alum Rock Road. However, they do an OK job here. Even if the coffee isn’t more of a Portuguese style.

Ritual not only roasts their coffee, but they even custom farm-source some of their custom blend coffee. When we visited, they were pulling single-origin espresso shots from Matalapa La Sidra, La Libertad, El Salvador from their three-group La Marzocco Linea. The resulting espresso has a good, sharp depth. While not as robust as what you might get directly from a Ritual Coffee Roasters café, it still has a bit of personality in the cup as a sharper, clearly Central American shot with more of a turpeny base. Served in wide ACF cups.

Back in their restaurant, they serve espresso and offer a coffee menu highlighting three different farms as French press coffees ($4 for a small pot, $8 for a large). Credit is due for taking their coffee seriously here: many of the best high-end restaurants in town don’t have a coffee service half as good in either thoughtfulness or execution.

Read the review of Horatius.

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 places serving Equator Estate coffees and purchased some roasts for our home use. We invariably found them to be too tepid in flavor depth, richness or “personality” to make them stand out from the crowd. It was only this year that we finally came across an example of their coffee we truly liked. To this day, it remains the lone exception, and we suspect that some of this has to do with a lack of quality control over their delivery chain (e.g., cafés/restaurants that let their coffee lose flavor and go stale, etc.).

But of course, we’re only one opinion with a taste palate that may radically differ from anyone else’s. For example, we’ve recently come to the conclusion that, pound-for-pound, we somewhat regularly produce better results at home with the coffee from Barefoot Coffee Roasters rather than, say, the celebrated Blue Bottle Coffee — an opinion that may count as blasphemy among so many Blue Bottle loyalists in the city.

However, there’s no question that our congratulations must go out to Equator Estate Coffees for earning Roast Magazine‘s 2010 American Roaster of the Year Award: Equator Estate Coffees and Teas Wins Coffee Industry’s Top Honor. Past winners have included the likes of Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea, Zoka Coffee Roasters, and Stumptown Coffee Roasters — which is great company in any context. Now only if we could find a way to appreciate their coffee in the way others obviously have.

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 slowly creeping in. Yet the gap is still exceedingly large: of the current Top 28 on CoffeeRatings.com, only one location, Bar Bambino, is an actual restaurant.

There is a litany of reasons for why this is. Unfortunately, much of the food service/restaurant industry seems clueless about them. Case and point is a recent article published on the culinary Web site, Behind the Burner: Interview With a Coffee Roaster – Article – Behind the Burner TM.

The author, John Grossmann, interviews Alex Roberts, master roaster at Emeryville-based Roast Coffee Co.. Roast opened in early 2008 as part of the Bacchus Management Group (love the Web site, btw), a small management team behind a handful of eclectic Bay Area restaurants. Mr. Grossmann calls Roast an “unusual startup” that’s performing a “new twist in dining” by sourcing and roasting its own beans. And that’s where the naïveté starts spilling out.

Bean there, done that

For one, roasters offering restaurants custom roasts and blends has been a common practice for decades. One potentially different angle could be in custom bean sourcing, but market economics would prevent Roast from directly sourcing beans from different farms for a single restaurant — which would be the only new ground there. Bacchus Management Group promotes Roast as unique because it is “by the restaurants, for the restaurants”, but exclusively servicing the industry’s least discriminating business customers hardly seems like a virtue.

The interview then succumbs to the ever-popular wine analogy. (It’s quite ironic that they should then do that, given that we cannot think of any restaurant-operated wineries worthy of note.) Mr. Grossmann asks, “Has the day of the coffee sommelier dawned?” To which Mr. Roberts replies:

I think so. I’d love to have the first job as a coffeelier, let’s call it. This would be somebody who understands all the single origins. All the specifications of the farm it came from, all the nuances of the coffee. Is it high grown, low grown? If there’s a blend, what each coffee in the blend contributes. The coffeelier would also suggest coffee and dessert pairings.

What’s so wrong about a restaurant coffee sommelier?

And therein lies the rub. Any restaurant mention of a coffee sommelier invariably glosses over the fact that a successful coffee service isn’t as simple as merely pulling a cork on a bottle of roasted beans. Just a couple weeks ago, we posted an article with the common opinion that a great barista can make magic of weak bean sources, and that superior beans and roasts can go to rot in untrained hands and poorly maintained equipment. Machine maintenance and “barista” training standards at restaurants are still woefully inadequate at best.

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with dreaming of the day that restaurants offer a variety of coffee options and a guide, or coffeelier, to walk patrons through them. But while Roast can tweak their fresh bean formula until the cows come home, any lofty designs for restaurant coffee appreciation will fail miserably if they’re built upon a rotten foundation of poor training, faulty equipment maintenance, and shoddy brewing practices.

An article from last year does suggest that training is an integral part of Roast’s engagement with restaurants. However, elite Bay Area roasters have long expressed immense frustration at getting training compliance out of cafés, let alone the scattered attention of restaurants. (Some have even expressed using CoffeeRatings.com for business intelligence — to identify retailers doing unmerciful things to their roasts, pointing to our site’s reviews as evidence of the need for training.) Roast Coffee Co.’s three-person operation is hardly poised to succeed where so many larger organizations have failed.

Until these fundamentals are addressed, Mr. Roberts’s dream of being a coffeelier rings about as hollow as a dentist who waxes poetic about the latest laser teeth whitening technology but cannot be bothered with the mundane task of actually cleaning and polishing your teeth. What good are white teeth if plaque and gum disease cause them to fall out? Coffee sourcing, roasting, and a lack of coffeeliers aren’t the problem. Restaurant coffee standards will not improve until the basics of training, maintenance, storage, and a commitment to quality are fixed.

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 serious dining establishment. More to the point, unlike many of its high-end restaurant peers, their seriousness extends all the way to their coffee service.

Located in the Belden-Stratford Hotel across the Lincoln Park Conservatory, Chef Laurent Gras resurfaced here in May 2008 after previously making waves in SF. In 2001, he served as Executive Chef at SF’s Fifth Floor and was named Chef of the Year in San Francisco magazine for 2002.

The restaurant models itself as a sort of inventive, high-end, Japanese-influenced (and very expensive) seafood restaurant, but that’s limiting the menu a bit. They boast that they don’t use distributors for their seafood — FedEx’ing it in from fishermen directly, so that what they serve has only been out of the sea for two days. They’re also proud of their two tatami rooms, where they sand down wooden tables before you eat off of them.

As a test, we saw their Japanese seafood snobbery and tried to raise them with some of our own West Coast J-snobbery, asking if they offered any unpasteurized sake. No dice. (Hooray for San Francisco snobbery.) They are inventive, however, and borrow heavily from the science lab techniques of the cuisine-formerly-known-as-molecular-gastronomy: liquid nitrogen, freeze-drying equipment, vacuum pumps, etc.

To their discredit, they tend to go crazy pairing some form of a gelée with nearly every course, and they also exhibit an occasional odd use of what we can only call marshmallow nouveau. It’s no COI, but it’s impressively good.

And of course, there are white tablecloths and multiple servers — the latter who are fun rather than stuffy.

We would have been remiss by not talking about their food, so back to the subject of coffee. Restaurant coffee has long been an afterthought at many of even the finest American restaurants, but that’s not true here. This is the only restaurant we’ve seen with a Clover machine. They offer Intelligentsia for both Clover and espresso use, using Black Cat Espresso (also available as decaf) from a two-group La Marzocco in the back service area.

With the Marzocco, they produce a thinner, textured layer of medium-to-dark brown crema. The body is a bit thinner as well — related to the larger pour size. It has a mostly pungent flavor with no smokiness and is served in Hering-Berlin porcelain cups.

They make a serious attempt at a restaurant coffee program here. Yet it still leaves significant room for improvement.

Read the review of L2O Restaurant in Chicago.

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 coffee history — a history that we often reference and yet few locals may know about.

For example, there’s the Gold Rush origins of Folgers and Hills Bros. There’s Caffé Trieste and the birth of the SF cappuccino in the 1950s. There’s Peet’s Coffee & Tea‘s Berkeley origins from 1966 and their influence on a budding Seattle retail coffee company known as Starbucks. And of course there are obligatory nods to the city’s nouvelle vague roasters — plus a couple of redeemable restaurant coffee options.

Though perhaps our favorite reference is a 1963 SF Chronicle headline sensationally highlighting the sad state of SF restaurant coffee. (But perhaps not sensational enough to make Hearst proud.) Within six years we were able to put men on the moon, and yet 46 years later most restaurant coffee in this city is still rather terrifying.

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 year Jeremy Tooker (along with partners that included Stumptown‘s Duane Sorenson) split from nearby Ritual Coffee Roasters to start a new coffee business that avoided the trappings of Ritual’s Valencia St. coffee bar (besides emphasizing more of the roasting operations). While it’s still early to tell, so far it’s not clear if they solved many of Ritual’s problems so much as relocated them a few blocks up Valencia St.

Not surprisingly, given loyalties and lineage, many of the clientèle here fit the same MO as Ritual’s customers. The lack of Wi-Fi and laptop outlets might prevent some table squatting. But like the liquor store/mini-marts of my old Southwest Berkeley neighborhood, there are already early signs of a “front sidewalk loiter” that so many Ritual customers have perfected. And when we approached the counter to make a purchase, most of the staff and the customers in line were perfectly content to mill about and socialize as if at a kegger party rather than service the line or make an order. Hopefully this is something that will diminish as the novelty wears off.

On the positive side, they finally can boast some baseline customer amenities: places to sit with tables or counters, and a lone a restroom complete with hanging chandelier and a laminate floor that sports a hunting motif. This latter detail nicely compliments the four boars’ heads that adorn one wall above a display of roasted coffee for sale. Apparently, each of these trophies Jeremy hunted off of eBay — at least if we are to believe this informative video published by SF Gate: SF Gate: Multimedia (video).

The five-minute video is a rather worthwhile interview with Jeremy, who offers an early tour of the space, demonstrates how to make a great French press of coffee, and discusses a variety of topics that include restaurant coffee, SF’s coffee history before Seattle stole the limelight, and Direct Trade.

The entire space, despite its in-progress roasting operations in back as PG&E allows in the gas lines, centers around the café’s showpiece: two beautiful Mistral Triplette espresso machines, tricked out with Four Barrel branding in glowing glory. These machines themselves are worth the trip, given their rarity and the exquisite machine design handiwork of Kees van der Westen (though the Mistral is now distributed by La Marzocco). Duane Sorenson’s influence shines through.

Oh, but how was the espresso? Great, of course. Until they get their own roasting operations up, they are serving Stumptown’s Hairbender blend. The baristas here are meticulous and deliberate — rightfully taking their sweet time to do it right. They pull shots with a darker, mottled, somewhat bubbly looking crema. The body is a touch thin for the pedigree. But flavorwise, the shot is supremely bright: mostly a sharp pungency of spices and some herbal elements, but there are traces of honey, nuts, and even orange peel. That much hasn’t changed.

Read the updated review of Four Barrel Coffee.