Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

In the Mint Plaza, right across the Blue Bottle Cafe mothership, this café provides some pretty good outdoor dining options — albeit without much shade on sunny days. There’s also a but of limited indoor seating upstairs and a homier cellar below. Alberto Avalle, a founder of New York’s Il Buco, partnered with others to [...]

This upstairs café (though more of a Western restaurant) resides in the rather infamous birthplace of California Cuisine. At least when Alice Waters decided to take her local, farm-fresh cooking operation out of a house and into this formal spot decades ago. Yes, dear Alice may be the mother of most of what’s good about [...]

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 [...]

While San Francisco ponders life without its own newspaper, the Pittsburgh (PA) Post-Gazette announced today that they are dedicating monthly editions of the paper’s dining section to be their new coffee section: The coffee’s on. From the article: It’s clear a growing number of Pittsburgh cafes are on the cutting edge of coffee and espresso, [...]

Today’s Vallejo Times Herald published a profile piece on Vallejo-based Moschetti Espresso: Grounds for success – Vallejo Times Herald. Owner Fabrice Moschetti moved here from Nice, France some 20 years ago. These roots show in some of the machine lines his company distributes to Bay Area restaurants, including Monaco-based Conti and Essika. Tweet

Earlier this week, the SF Chronicle ran a piece on the escalating coffee wars among area restaurants: What’s New: Restaurants brewing up gourmet blends. With the likes of the SJ Mercury News running front-page stories this week on the coffee war between McDonald’s and Starbucks, hopefully places that sell $18 hamburgers might try to outdo [...]

This installment of our Espresso in Torino and Piemonte series comes from the very small town of Pollenzo, practically in the middle of nowhere. At least geographically speaking. But on the food map of Italy, this place is one of the country’s brightest stars. One of the reasons is that it is home to the [...]

Today Bloomberg published an article about the latest generation of restaurant and home espresso machines, designed with the idiot in mind: Idiot-Proof Espresso Machines End Excuses, Target U.S. Market – Bloomberg.com: Spend. Andrea Illy of Illycaffè has to be very careful not to speak out of both sides of his mouth. On the one hand, [...]

Today’s The Sydney Morning Herald ponders how Australia’s Italian immigrants could bring a culture of appreciation for some of the best espresso in the world, and yet New York City — no stranger to Italian immigrants — is such a puzzling espresso wasteland: Brew ha ha in city that falls short on espresso – Opinion [...]

It’s not just us — other Bay Area restaurant connoisseurs have noted the horrendous state of restaurant coffee. Today the SF Chronicle‘s food editor, Michael Bauer, wrote in his blog about readers who suggested he could do more to play up the coffee quality in his restaurant reviews: Michael Bauer: Between Meals : Coffee talk [...]