We don’t reserve our Trip Reports for just the finer examples of retail espresso. As our database shows, we learn from forgettable and even wretched espresso shots. Falling somewhere between the two is Whole Foods Market. Their Potrero Hill location had to be a bit of a construction project, with a parking garage underneath the store and a Whole Foods Market Bistro off to the lower, southeast corner.

Like many Whole Foods Markets, the place is littered with green sloganeering covering a number of walls for that “Chairman Mao memorial” feel. In fact, the long hallway from the parking garage exhaults enough odes to sustainable, social, and environmental causes that — if viewed in another era — the wall could easily be mistaken for the hieroglyphical praise of a pharaoh’s immortal spirit inside an ancient Egyptian pyramid.

We adore Slow Food as much as the next eco-food Nazi. But can we merely obsess about what we eat without the grocer making us feel like we’re walking a Stations-of-the-Organic-Cross gauntlet to get at it? Maybe not quite as creepy and cult-like as the Organic Coffee Co., but still score it a solid 7/10 on the Creep-O-Meter.

At the corner entrance to their Bistro, there are several simple tables and counter seating at tall stools beneath large glass windows. At the counter of the coffee bar they sell pastries, cold drinks, gelato, and various coffee concoctions — with a full-service grill at the back. Drinking coffee here, let alone eating, is a cacophony of odd noises: encoded mumblings over the grocery store PA system, annoying store phone ringers, order buzzers, and a string of other jarring ambient sounds.

For espresso, they have two Franke superautomatic machines and bold eco-branding featuring their use of “Allegro Handcrafted Coffee”. Their unskilled baristas use them to push-button pull shots of a correctly moderate size. Yet they have a thin film of a pale, almost sickly crema and they arrive at a tepid serving temperature. The shortness of the shot saves it from being a complete disaster, as it has some measure of body and un-filter-coffee-like flavor: some cedar and baker’s chocolate without much distinct pepper, spice, nor herbal elements.

This is remarkably consistent with other Whole Foods locations for both good and bad reasons (mostly not-so-good). Though here they do offer the option of Rego (Oneida) porcelain cups and saucers. But come on Whole Foods: what good is all the green branding and feel-good sloganeering if the end product tastes like a (recycled) cardboard box?

Read the review of the Whole Foods Market in Potrero Hill.

Whether it’s coffee or Slow Food Nation (or both), today there’s a strong public undercurrent of knee-jerk, reactionary dismissiveness of anybody who dares suggest that the generic brand-X-in-a-can isn’t good enough for them.

The mistaken public belief is that most of the things we eat and drink today are somehow normal, inevitable, and “natural” outcomes — and not necessarily the result of a series of cut corners to even outright scary practices made to industrialize food production and minimize costs (while also maximizing profits).

Now minimizing costs is a good thing. But when it’s the only thing, when lowest price is the rule and all consumables are considered interchangeable commodities, typically all the production tradeoffs made to minimize those costs are swept under the carpet and consumers are kept blissfully unaware.

Elitist snobs! Food freaks!

If you operated a business where you produced a good or product that consumers thought the only difference was price, how would you run that business? You’d make the cheapest stuff available — using as low-grade supplies as you could, and performing whatever compromising processes and practices you could to keep expenses down. You’d follow Henry Ford’s rules of industrialization, add scale, find innumerable ways to cut corners. This is how you’d make your profits. The only other challenge would be ensuring that whatever came out the other end of your machinery still qualified as the product in the eyes of indiscriminate consumers.

These practices in the mid- to late-20th century ensured that we were sold unripe oranges shipped on trucks and painted orange for consumer appeal. It ensured that supermarket tomatoes were hard and flavorless. It ensured that the chicken we eat came from factory farms where the animals were raised in impossibly tight quarters, succumbed to various diseases and illnesses because of the conditions, and then had to be pumped with drugs and antibiotics to combat these illnesses and keep them alive under those conditions. All the things that would horrify our grandmothers in contrast to what they used to call “food”. But even what do they know, given the transparency and accountability of the sausage factory these days?

The analogue for coffee today is embodied by the Big Four. Coffee beans were treated as the equivalent of nuts on screws — so producers were incented to find the cheapest, lowest grade stuff available. This is how we got in the Fair Trade mess in the first place. The major international coffee producers sought robusta supplies from Vietnam and other emerging markets — bean supplies that were cruder, and yet far cheaper, than their existing suppliers. They added chemical treatments to make it taste more like their “old” coffee, and violá! No transparency. No accountability. Just give me a big can of generic “coffee”.

Food snobs unite!

Today people are coming to a greater awareness that their tomatoes don’t taste the same under these conventional rules of industrialization as they do from the backyard. And so there’s a growing consumer interest and demand for accountability and transparency in what they are actually getting for their money. A tomato isn’t necessarily like every other tomato, and the same is true for coffee in how it is grown, handled, and prepared.

It’s always been true: you often get what you pay for. But how many of us truly know what we’re getting, or what we’re contributing to, when we demand whole chicken at Safeway for 69¢ per pound?

A lot of people still want lowest common denominator products. All fine and good — that’s a matter of choice, and economics. But should someone remember what a ripe tomato really used to taste like and asks for that experience again, does that make them an elitist food snob? If so, we will proudly wear the badge of elitist food snob with honor. Food snobs everywhere are saving our food supply from becoming one giant Play-doh Fun Factory fed by tubes of high fructose corn syrup.

Interestingly enough, yesterday The Consumerist highlighted a Pittsburgh-area video from WTAE-TV. It featured someone’s grandmother, and she demonstrated some of the clandestine production practices a Big Four coffee producer followed to squeeze every last drop of profit out of their “tastes like crap” coffee. As if we’re surprised…

UPDATE: Sept. 20, 2008
Is it any wonder that the most publicized “anti-food-snob” forces out there right now are represented by McDonald’s?: Shop Talk » Blog Archive » McDonald’s brews up anti-coffee snob ad blitz | Blogs | Reuters.com. All we can say is: Viva la snobbery!

As one of the final events of Slow Food Nation ’08, we attended The Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity Coffee Presidia tasting at Coffee Bar.

It is quite a mouthful of nouns. But the key points are that Slow Food is a non-profit, its Foundation for Biodiversity is a countermeasure effort to the dwindling food product diversity in the world (e.g., today the American food supply is dependent on just 7% of the food product diversity that was once available to us in 1900 [thank you, Monsanto]), and Presidia are Slow Food groups that promote different local foods and traditions — such as coffee growing.

Monday’s event was a an educational and publicity affair among coffee professionals, showcasing some of Slow Food’s efforts to develop, enrich, and promote the coffee markets of the Huehuetenango Highland Coffee Presidium (Guatemala) and the Sierra Cafetalera Coffee Presidium (Dominican Republic). Working with local farmers and cooperatives, the Slow Food Foundation seeks to preserve the heritage of these unique crops — and elevate their quality for consumers and the quality of life for their farming communities.

While not a formal coffee cupping, French press samples were prepared to standard while representatives of the various cooperatives from the Dominican Republic and Guatemala spoke about their coffees with the help of a volunteer translator. Seeing and hearing from those who work at origin is a relatively rare experience in S.F. — and stories of life on a Guatemalan or Dominican Republic coffee farm are a humbling contrast to the criticism of “elitist food snobbery” that has often been levied against Slow Food Nation. (Between that and complaints that the $65 entrance fee to the Food Pavilions for this non-profit wasn’t an all-you-can-eat Sizzler proves that stupid people are everywhere.)

But if that doesn’t scream “elitist snob” enough for you, this Huehuetenango coffee is also roasted by prisoners at Torino, Italy’s Vallette prison through a social cooperative called Pausa Cafè. Coincidentally, last year we sampled this very same Pausa Cafè-roasted Huehuetenango coffee at Caffè Carpano in Torino’s Eataly.

Not only did some 60 coffee professionals get to enjoy conversation, coffee, and wine over a fine organic dinner prepared by chef Eskender Aseged of Radio Africa & Kitchen fame, but we were even supplied with sample greens of Huehuetenango Highland coffee. The green beans were an appropriate touch for this crowd (and fortunately I’m also a home roaster).

Included in a small media kit was a 25-minute DVD-video documentary of the Huehuetenango Highland Coffee Presidium, with its opening scene taking place in none other than Alba, Italy’s Caffè Calissano. The documentary was also set in Venice, Italy’s Caffè del Doge — whose Slow-Food-affiliated Huehuetenango San Pedro Necta single origin espresso we rated quite highly at their Palo Alto location two years ago.

I quickly learned that event chair Andrea Amato, who is in charge of the Latin American Presidia for the Slow Food Foundation, is also a big juventino — so we finished the evening with shots of limoncello and lamentations over Juventus’ last-minute falter in drawing 1-1 at Fiorentina on Sunday. Just the way they do it in Italy.

It is Labor Day weekend in San Francisco. And the only thing keeping us from inaugurating Itching Man, our long-proposed rival event to Burning Man, was Slow Food Nation ’08.

For a little background, we mentioned this event in a post last week. Given how it had been billed, we had hopes there would be elements of Torino’s Eataly, hopes of good discussions about the many insidious and harmful trade-offs we’ve made in modern society to heavily industrialize food production over the past 50 years (think Michael Pollan), and hopes there would be a lot of drinking of, and conversation about, good coffee. It delivered at least something on all counts.

But in the end, our feelings about the event are rather mixed. While it has achieved some of its goals, it totally missed the mark on others.

About Slow Food

Take Slow Food itself. This event seems to have successfully developed a much greater awareness of Slow Food here. Yet the event seems to have done little to clue in many attendees, let alone most of the general public, what Slow Food is really about. If we had not previously immersed ourselves in the land of Slow Food’s birth, we’re not sure we would have come away from this event with any of the social and cultural understanding we developed in Italy.

Slow Food Nation has admirably tried to keep the message as simple as “good, clean, and fair.” It has exposed many consumers to the notion that good, clean, and fair aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive, and it has also done a very effective job at not merchandising itself. However, its events have been a bit chaotic and incongruous — seemingly espousing different or unclear themes in different places. Is it a foodie thing where people just gorge on different foods? Is it some green politics thing that just adds to the cacophony of causes out there?

Northern Californians always seem to find a way to botch up a good imported idea by hijacking it with our own local political biases and causes to make it into our own. From what we could tell at the events, some people thought Slow Food belonged to the “buy local” movement. Others thought it was just another elitist food thing in support of food snobbery and selling $25-a-pound turkeys. Even some of the people representing Slow Food U.S. were among the guilty: one of the speakers at the Civic Center Plaza yesterday told the audience that the event was more than just a Bay Area thing — implying as if the movement was invented here, oblivious of its Italian roots as a means of standing up to the clear-cutting of the American fast food and factory farming machines.

It’s in these areas that Slow Food Nation has, thus far, failed at its mission. Though to be fair, this is just a first step in the U.S. as an inaugural event.

So why do we support Slow Food?

Cause fatigue is at epidemic levels these days. Much of the world, and even the Bay Area, seems tired of being told what to do — and that whatever you have been doing is most assuredly wrong. So it’s no surprise that people respond with cynicism and defensiveness to things like Slow Food. Greenwashing is also rampant. I often joke to my wife that some day soon I expect to see a glossy, feel-good oil company magazine ad placement — informing me of how, in an effort to help combat the effects of global warming, ExxonMobil is using recycled petroleum products to provide drowning polar bears with water wings.

And the aforementioned food elitism argument against things like Slow Food is very real. At the Slow Food Nation farmers’ market in the Civic Center Plaza, we found organic strawberries going for $8 a pint (!). Meanwhile, at the regular Heart of the City Farmers’ Market, just across Larkin St. in the U.N. Plaza yesterday, we found certified organic strawberries at three pints for $7. How can a lay consumer not feel they are being gouged by elitists?

And yet, when it comes to Slow Food, the $8-a-pint organic strawberry argument is completely missing the point. Last May when I was in India, I read media stories on the Web about the rising costs of food and the developing U.S. recession. American mothers were lamenting that they could no longer afford to shop for organic and whole foods for their families. I read this while I was waist-deep in some of the most heartbreaking poverty on the planet. And yet, looking around, I noticed that virtually everyone in India eats organic food almost exclusively. Unless we’re prepared to call the destitute of the Indian subcontinent “elitist snobs,” what’s wrong with this picture?

There’s plenty of statistical debate about the causes of obesity and the reduction of life expectancy in the U.S. But we support the principles of Slow Food because, first of all, the food is often better than the alternative (and our factory farming lifestyle is the alternative — not the other way around). And because we are making ourselves sick as a society through reduced biodiversity, fish collapses, corn-dominated diets and other monocultures, a Farm Bill that rewards corporate farms for not producing anything, and unsustainable factory farming.

Slow Food dares suggest that knowing who produces what you eat, and how it is made, can lead to a better standard of living for both producer and consumer. It’s a system that, at least in Italy, creates potential levels for both quality and accountability that would be difficult to achieve otherwise.

So what does any of this have to do with coffee?

A lot, actually.

We don’t believe we qualify as some of the city’s stereotypical green lemmings who support a prefab checklist of causes. For example, we’ve made no secret of the fact that we’ve never supported the Fair Trade system. But Direct Trade, on the other hand, is another story. In the Slow Food Nation message of “good, clean, and fair,” “good” comes first: it has to be about making a better product. Similarly, “good” is a key value and differentiator of Direct Trade, and it’s certainly a big reason why Intelligentsia buyer Geoff Watts dropped their Fair Trade affiliation two years ago in favor of their own Direct Trade route.

On Saturday we visited the Coffee Taste Pavilion at Slow Food Nation. The pavilion was split with attendees forming lines in two distinct areas: one for sampling a variety of espresso shots from a row of La Marzocco GB/5s, and the other for performing taste comparisons of brewed filter coffee. Behind these was a service area with Clover brewers and a lot of classic brown Nuova Point cups getting a wash for the next round.

Unlike the structure of, say, a barista competition, this was more an informal line-up of people who wanted to sample and learn about different coffees — with baristas and coffee professionals all too happy to enjoy and discuss it with them. Almost nothing was written down — to encourage conversation and to not give credit to any one coffee estate, roaster, café, or whatnot. Roughly the same approach was followed at all the other taste pavilions. While it avoided partiality and encouraged conversation, this was one area that differed dramatically from our Slow Food Italy experience — where restaurants will take a certain pride by meticulously listing all their purveyors for butter, flour, salt, etc., on the menus.

As a result of this approach, our notes were sketchy at best. But a few things stood out, including the very sweet Ritual Roasters‘ espresso of single origin Finca el Guayabo, Huila of Colombia. (My wife noted how neither sugar was required — nor, to be sheepish for her to notice, was it available.) Then there was the interesting, well-rounded, wet-processed (and vacuum-sealed 18 months prior!) single origin Yirgacheffe Konga Cooperative espresso from Ecco Caffè that curator Andrew Barnett walked us through.

Another highlight was a comparative tasting of filter brewed coffee with Edwin Martinez (mentioned in an SF Chronicle story yesterday). After sampling some Panamanian and Ethiopian coffees (details long since forgotten), I had noted how many of the Indonesian coffees have fallen out of vogue lately — along with untrendiness of blends and darker roasts. Edwin noted how he once sat at a tasting of some 300 Indonesian coffees, and the rich-bodied, vegetal earthiness ultimately made them all taste like V8 Juice after a while.

In conclusion…

So to summarize some of our experiences at Slow Food Nation, and particularly the Taste Pavilions, we bring you an analysis we used for the last Western Regional Barista Competition (WRBC)…

The good

• The Fish Pavilion — Clearly the best food and the best pavilion design at the Taste Pavilions. Hands down. Some of the most interesting food offerings and great conversational opportunities. And their use of black, sheer screens with the X-ray images of fish skeletons was art.
• Good food, and even better coffee — But oddly enough, the consumer-oriented experience at Torino’s Eataly still blew this out of the water. While the Taste Pavilions offered some really good food items, Eataly leaves you thinking that you’ve just had some of the best-in-class food items of their kind available on the planet.
• Slow Dough — The Taste Pavilions had their own currency, which many vendors marked off for your tastings. Given the $65 entrance fee to even get in the Taste Pavilions, this seemed a bit of a gouge at first. However, the amount of Slow Dough provided with the entry fee was more than plenty (and the Coffee Pavilion required none of it).
• The mixing of food groups — Perhaps the best part of the entire event was seeing the co-mingling of vendors and enthusiasts for different foods. For example, the specialty coffee world is often a rather insular lot. But here, they were exposed to people in entirely different markets that hold many of the same principles and values of quality, sustainability, and fairness. Just seeing Ritual Roasters’ Eileen Hassi sampling ice cream with friends at the neighboring Ice Cream Pavilion gave you a sense of connections that wouldn’t happen elsewhere.

The bad

• Slow Food, Slower Service — While organizers were wise to sell out the Taste Pavilions for different blocks of time and meter out the crowds, it still resulted in a number of very long lines for different food tastings. Think the lines at Disneyland, but with a payoff being a few samples of cheese. Thankfully the organizers caught on by offering tastes to those waiting in line, otherwise some patrons might have starved to death waiting in line at a food festival.
• Lectures were too packed — When the likes of Charlie Trotter come to talk about Slow Food cooking, a separate lecture space larger than 2,000 square feet would have been a good idea.
• Compartmentalization — One way in which the Taste Pavilions were very much like Eataly was that you had to wait in line at several different stations if you wanted to put something close to a meal together. But more critically, the separate Taste Pavilions each seemed to have their own confusing set of protocols and rules of engagement that patrons had to learn anew each time.
• Lack of published information — Sure, you could say a main point of the Taste Pavilions event was to inspire conversation. But even after talking up a storm about various consumables, the notable absence of any labeling, note-taking, and take-home materials left very limited opportunities for follow-up.

The ugly

• Too much caffeine — As with the 4th Machine at the WRBC, there can be too much of a good thing. Fortunately we were able to pace ourselves out and consume a lot of other things between caffeinated doses. But it sure makes for a long night.

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 the first time as Slow Food Nation — part expo, part celebration of good food and good food-producing practices, and part public education campaign.

Fort Mason will host the Taste Pavilions for the event, where organizers will dedicate large exposition spaces to twenty different culinary arts: spices, oils, chocolate, beer, wine, and — yes! — even coffee. (If it is anything like what we experienced at Torino, Italy’s Eataly last year, it’s going to be a blast.) The coffee pavilion itself promises to be about 2,000 square feet, curated by Andrew Barnett of Ecco Caffè, Eileen Hassi of Ritual Coffee Roasters, and Tony Konecny of tonx.org fame.

Mr. Barnett was recently interviewed by CHOW, where he described the coffee pavilion as offering four different coffee tastes from four different regions/varietals/farms. You can download a podcast of his interview (5:49, 3.3 Mb), where he also helps describe some of the objectives of the event:

“It’s to turn the restaurateurs on to what a great cup of coffee tastes like. Coffee in many ways has been the bastard child of the culinary world. It was an afterthought.”

Some 50,000 attendees are expected at Slow Food Nation. The coffee pavilion alone expects to serve some 3,000-4,000 people a day — compared with the 1,100 transactions per day normally handled by Ritual Coffee Roasters.

We’ll be attending the Taste Pavilion (note: daytime tickets are sold out, but evening tickets are still available) — and we are looking forward to much more than just the coffee pavilion. We’ll also be attending the Slow Food Foundation for Biodiversity coffee & dinner event, held the following Monday at Coffee Bar. So expect future posts here on these topics.

In the meantime, we leave you with an artist’s rendition of some of the architectural detail planned at the event. Each taste pavilion is being designed out of repurposed materials by some of the Bay Area’s top design firms. For example, the pickle-and-chuntey booth, depicted below, will consist of walls made of pickle jars and a ceiling made of some 3,000 mason jar lids suspended from wires — all assembled just days before the event:

Photo courtesy California Home + Design magazine

Our Espresso in Torino and Piemonte series now turns to Bra, Italy. Bra carries a lot more influence than its 29,000 residents might suggest. For one, it is the unofficial capital of Piemonte’s Roero area — with a downtown that’s deceptively bustling for its size. Bra is also the world headquarters for Slow Food.

Of 18 bars in all of Italy singled out for their café excellence by the Bar d’Italia del Gambero Rosso (i.e., awarded 3 tazzine and 3 chicchi), Converso Bra is clearly one of them. It is a relatively small corner establishment near downtown Bra, and it can be easy to miss. It has turn-of-the-19th-century looks, but there is also covered outdoor seating along Via Cavour, across the street from the San Giovanni Decollato church, that help give its nearby location away.

It is by no means a large space. A third of the storefront (entering from Via Serra) is dedicated to its excellent pastries and sweets. But in back there is a cozy mirrored coffee bar with several tables and dark wood. It’s a prime neighborhood location for a great caffè in the morning before work. And while the pastries are excellent, a word of warning: definitely eat with it wrapped in the treated paper napkins supplied on the tables. Touching the sticky-sweet surface of those things is like handling a mouse glue board.

Using a three-group Leva 3 manual La San Marco, the barista (often a woman here) pulls espresso shots with a medium brown, even, full crema of good texture and thickness. It has a complex herbal flavor — cloves, etc. — that is quite unusual for Illy beans. There can be a slight sourness, not unpleasant, to the cup at times. Served in Illy logo IPA cups. A bit pricey at €1.20, but you’re paying for some of Italy’s finest.

Read the review of Pasticceria Converso Bra.

Our Espresso in Torino and Piemonte series turns back to Torino for an espresso at Eataly — which has taken over the former Carpano vermouth factory across the street of Torino’s massive Lingotto complex. Torino is also the birthplace of vermouth and consequently the apéritif. (I am also quite a longtime fan of Carpano Antica.)

Formed by Piero Alciati (of Guido Ristorante Pollenzo, reviewed earlier this week) and various other food illuminaries in the region, Eataly is akin to SF’s Ferry Building Marketplace on crack and steroids. Inside Eataly is also the Guido per Eataly restaurant.

To start, Eataly is massive — at about 120,000 square feet of food, restaurant, and food education space. There are sections dedicated to food from the oven (il forno: pizza & foccacia, etc.), fish, vegetables, meats, pasta, cheese & salumi, gelato, wine, beer, etc. In addition to selling these artisanal food items, each section also has its own in-store “restaurant” featuring these foods. A second Eataly complex has just opened in Milan, with a smaller cousin soon to open in New York City.

Below is a YouTube video I found that hints at just some of the size and breadth of what you can find at Eataly. London’s Harrods no longer seemed so big anymore. (Yes, that space in the beginning of the video is just the vegetable market.):

As with much of Piemonte, Slow Food is king here. And, as is the Italian way, any respectable public gathering space must have a good café nearby to gather at and partake in your recommended daily allowance of espresso. At Eataly, that café is called Caffè Carpano — named for the original vermouth factory on the premises.

Caffè Carpano is located at the lower level, further towards the back. You enter past the roasting equipment and shelves of roasted coffee.

The café features three dual-group Gaggia machines and a lot of Italians needing their espresso fix. They sell beans under the Hue Hue Café name, from Pausa Café, and their primary blend consists of 40% Guatemalan San Pedro Necta cru, 30% arabica, and 30% robusta. (Hue Hue, pronounced “way-way”, is short for Huehuetenango — a region, or department, of northwest Guatemala.) Other options, however, are possible (as shown in the coffee menu photo below).

With their standard Hue Hue Café blend, they produce shots with a medium brown crema with textured speckling and a great, potent aroma. It has a pungent, herbal flavor. Naturally best served as a ristretto, and a mere €0.85.

Read the review of Caffè Carpano.

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 the Slow Food-affiliated Università di Scienze Gastronomiche — the University of Gastronomic Sciences, the first of its kind in the world. Another reason is that it hosts a restaurant, Guido Ristorante Pollenzo, that served the best meal we had in this most over-the-top of food adventure travels we’ve ever been on.

It’s here on these vast castle grounds that we met Piero Alciati, who, along with his brother Ugo, established this destination restaurant in homage to the cooking of their mother, Mama Lidia Vanzino Alciati — a living legend in Piemonte cuisine (who, along with her husband Guido, opened the original Guido da Costigliole restaurant in the small Piemontese town of Costiglole d’Asti in 1961). The restaurant is rightfully known for its quite outrageously good food — much of it modern interpretations of Lidia’s classic Piemontese recipes.

Piero is an outstanding host at the front of the house while Ugo spends most of his time in the kitchen. Talking with Piero, you really sense his all-consuming passion for good food and wine.

In Piemonte we met master chefs who will take your reservation, unlock the door to let you in (it’s quite common to arrive at restaurants in Piemonte with locked doors, needing to ring the doorbell to be allowed in), take your order, recommend wines from their personal favorite vineyards, and cook your meal. But in Piero, we received a formal invitation to visit his massive fine food project at Torino’s Eataly — complete with a business card with his mobile phone number, an arranged tour, and a comped lunch there. And he didn’t know us from anyone. But we’ll save more on Eataly for a future Trip Report.

(Another observation about Piemonte restaurants: the dinner crowd fills in around 8:30pm-9pm, and that’s it. Whoever dines there rents the table for the night — there is no such thing as “turning tables” as there is in the U.S.)

So what’s with all the food talk? This is a coffee site, right?! Of course. But it’s important to understand the context in which an appreciation for great espresso comes. A good espresso is expected as an accompaniment to a great Italian meal. So consider this a representative tribute to the espresso standards of a fine Italian restaurant — unlike America’s finest restaurants, which require public shaming in lieu of doing the right thing. By showing us what is clearly possible, places like Guido further expose the excuseless farce that is espresso at American restaurants.

Did we mention that the setting is exquisite? The food here is equally so, and the espresso is no major let down either. (We hope you’re reading this, Thomas Keller.) Using a three-group Faema in the back kitchen, they pull espresso shots with a coagulated but thinner medium brown crema. It has a splotchy consistency with some of the espresso surface exposed — a definite flaw for most Italian establishments. But the shot is the perfect size, and they use roasts from the quite excellent (and quite obscure, outside of the gourmands in the area) Caffè Mokabar in Torino. The resulting cup is potent and has a flavor that’s mostly herbal (thyme, etc.).

While there are deficiencies, it’s still a solid restaurant espresso. It would rank among SF’s top 7%, sharing that honor with only three other restaurants currently. Piero and company may not be gunning for the best restaurant espresso in Italy, but they have standards to uphold. And at only €2, it doesn’t even come with an obscene mark-up.

In our Portugal travels last year, restaurant espresso was generally as good as anything in a café, and few of the residents held a consensus opinion on where to find the best examples. Here in Piemonte, while restaurant espresso was consistently good, it was the select few cafés in town that had the best espresso — and the locals generally knew it.

Read the review of Guido Ristorante Pollenzo.

Piemonte, or Piedmont, is a province located in the Italy’s northwest — near the Alps. Other than the 2006 Winter Olympics, the region has largely been a blind spot on the tourist’s map. Travel guidebooks and TV programs routinely ignore it. And that’s just the way we like it.

For example, in Torino — Piemonte’s capital and biggest city (and unified Italy’s first capital) — you can enjoy a vibrant Italian city with a population just larger than San Francisco that’s virtually unscarred by tourists. Here the spoken English language is still more of an engaging novelty — and not the ever-present drone of invading hoards carrying water bottles and looking for Renaissance art.

And while Piemonte represents only one of 20 provinces in Italy, it’s home to one-third of the 18 top cafés in Italy — at least according to Gambero Rosso. Torino itself lays claim to four of them — three more than any other town in the country.

But coffee is just the beginning of this region’s story. Despite lacking Italy’s biggest-name cultural treasures and tourist attractions, the area is rich with history, Baroque architecture, Roman ruins, hilltop Savoy castles, the Savoys’ answer to Versailles (La Venaria Reale, which opened the weekend we visited), arguably the best wine region in the country, an obsessive preoccupation with perfect food, excellent espresso, and the greatest grand café culture the world over.

There have been some significant changes since we were last in Torino (in May 2004, prior to the Olympics): far less air pollution (many city buses now run on cleaner energy), more infrastructure (they opened one of their two planned subway lines), and the conversion of the Lingotto complex from FIAT factory to Olympic Village to mega-mall.

Piemonte’s Food & Wine Obsession

To understand the context of Piemonte’s coffee culture, it first helps to understand their unique obsession with food and wine. Now in Italy, everything is about good food of course. But the Piemontese take this obsession to a whole other level. Emilia-Romagna may represent the heart of Italian culinary tradition, but Piemonte takes the traditional and decidedly makes it into deconstructed, modern art. In all my travels, I have never experienced anything quite like it.

Piemonte is the birthplace of the Slow Food movement and hosts its headquarters. We ate at restaurants where the menus listed the origins of their flour, butter, olive oil, etc. It’s home to barolo and barbaresco wines. The town of Alba is famous for the white truffle and its annual fair. And Torino is infamous for its gelato, it’s the birthplace of the chocolate bar (and home to arguably the world’s best chocolate), and it hosts the world’s biggest food and wine market in Eataly — an old Carpano vermouth factory that was converted into a kind of SF Ferry Building Marketplace on crack and steroids.

Despite popular local dishes that justifiably sound foul — such as crudo di Fossano, raw piles of veal, and vitello tonnato, veal topped with a tuna sauce (both excellent when done well) — the only thing we advise you to avoid is the pizza. It’s the one thing where they come up average (even the Ligurian farinata here). Most Americans don’t realize that pizza is a regional, not a national, dish. The popular consumption of pizza (as a Neapolitan creation) reached as far north as Roma just some 40 years ago. We’ve been eating pizza in Kansas for longer than many parts of Italy.

Piemonte Espresso Culture

What don’t you know already about Italians and their coffee culture? The Piemontese follow the traditional Italian culture of having a quick espresso several times a day like clockwork. It’s an excuse to socialize in brief spurts; it’s the equivalent of a “smoke break” and platonic speed dating. And as in many other parts of Italy, employees stuck in offices and storefronts can have their espresso shots delivered (sometimes covered in tin foil for transport) straight from the café. At every public gathering place, there’s a social expectation that good espresso is accessible nearby.

Here there is virtually no such thing as a double shot, or doppio. People will order two successive shots, certainly, but not at the same time. This follows the pattern of how the Italians prefer smaller stove-top moka pots at home. And like other northern Italians, a number of cafés offer the apertivo (or happy hour) buffet spread of sandwiches, salads, and appetizers with your drink order. Enough to skip dinner.

And unlike the 22-year-old wannabe hipster baristas sporting T-shirts, piercings, and tattoos you find common to cafés in North America, Scandinavia, and Oceania, they are decidedly “no wave” here. Older baristas are commonplace, and younger baristas are often akin to apprentices. Both maintain generally high standards of professional appearance — including even white jackets and black bow ties — like true bartenders (given the origins of the word barista) you’d expect to see in a James Bond film. That is the grand café way.

However, the Piemontese seem to break with a number of Italian “traditions” — not all of them are necessarily good habits. Although the storefronts here shut down religiously for a long lunch, a number of Piedmontese seem to have picked up the 12-hour workday. While most Italian children are well-behaved compared to their over-stimulated American counterparts, here they often seem over-indulged and allowed to freely squeal in public. As for the Torinese, their restaurants seem flaming hot while the locals still bundle up in coats and gloves. And when walking their reluctant small dogs (they are close to the French border, afterall), the Torinese often look like they’re dragging a small pot roast on a leash.

But perhaps the most shocking difference of all from most other Italians is that the locals — not tourists, mind you — sometimes order a cappuccino or macchiato after noon. Even with dinner. This would be blasphemy to most Italian rules and regulations regarding proper daily digestion. But here, the sour sounds of a squealing milk-frother — foreign and as jarring as nails to a chalkboard — are not uncommon at dinner. Such brutes.

Given Torino’s chocolate history, one local drink of note is the bicerin. It is a concoction of coffee, liquid chocolate, and fior de latte — the latter of which is much like the cream on the Irish Coffee at SF’s Buena Vista Cafe. And just like the Buena Vista, although the drink is enjoyable, you’d be hard pressed to find locals drinking it.

Piemonte Espresso Quality

So what about the espresso quality? In Alba I picked up a copy of the 2008 Bar d’Italia del Gambero Rosso that had just been published (FWIW, their Ristoranti d’Italia guide is stellar and never steered us wrong). It served as a good guide of what cafés to start with. Along with the six Piemonte cafés awarded 3 chicchi and 3 tazzine, we selected a mix of additional cafés to judge both their best and the typical.

Not surprisingly, their best didn’t quite match the very select best in North America. However, the typical blew 80% of America’s cafés out of the water. This also created a sort of quality compression — with the best not being that much better than the typical. They were quite consistently served with a medium brown crema speckled with darker brown, as if a local standard, and often with a small glass of water on the side.

Another generalization was that, like Portugal, most of their espresso shots are a touch watery for my tastes — even at the standard 30-35ml size. But ordering it as a ristretto makes a huge difference. However, to ensure fair comparisons, I stuck to my standard criteria when making reviews. Of course, none of the locals order a simple “caffè”. Their coffee order is more likely to be in the form of an adjective or a prepositional phrase than a noun: con la schiuma, bollente, forte, con la cioccolata in polvere sopra, etc.

On the subject of milk-based drinks, some of the places with weaker, thinner espresso would oddly offer some of the best milk foaming. Many cafés exhibit a token amount of latte art, but the cappuccino here runs very wet — there’s usually just a minimal layer of foam. The macchiato is, however, rather popular — even at its modest size compared to American versions.

Piemonte Espresso Brands

Among the most common brands of coffee in the area, this was my general order of preference:

1. Caffè Mokabar (Torino)
2. Illy (Trieste)
3. MoKafè (Alba)
4. Torrefazione Ponchione (Asti)
5. Lavazza (native to Torino)
6. Caffè Deorsola (Torino)
7. Caffè Costadoro (Torino)
8. Caffè Alberto (Torino)
9. Caffè Vergnano (at least in their 1882-branded cafés, from the Torino suburb of Santena)

Piemonte generally follows the rule that northern Italians roast lighter than their southern counterparts. Contrary to the “Italian espresso” roast profile stereotype in America, the typical roast is medium to moderately dark brown with some second crack signs and almost no detectable oil on its surface (about an Agtron #45, in some roaster circles).

What’s undoubtedly most surprising from this list is how highly I rate Illy, let alone Lavazza. As I suspected at the Lisbon Espressamente last year, Illy coffee seems fresher and produces a much better cup in Italy than when shipped overseas — despite all their freshness quality controls. (Though I was just shipped a can of Danesi from their Northern California distributor, and I was truly amazed at what crema I could get out of an imported can.)

This also follows a preference pattern I noticed among the Piemontese. While some held local “artisan” roasters (such as MoKafè or Ponchione) with particularly high regard, in general the idea of buying from a local roaster was not nearly as compelling here as it is in the U.S. Part of that could be that the entire nation is about the size of Arizona. But I also got the sense that some of the bigger roasters, such as Illy and Lavazza, made such big investments in quality controls that “big national name brand” weren’t dirty words.

As for espresso machines, I came across some machines from Faema and fewer from Gaggia, La San Marco, and La Spaziale. The lion’s share was clearly La Cimbali. This made me recall the residents of Porto, Portugal (which I liken as a sister city to Torino) who originally called espresso “cimbalinho” in reference to all the La Cimbali equipment first introduced there.

In the coming weeks, we’ll publish a series of individual Piemonte/Torino café reviews and link back to them below here for reference.

Name	Address	City	Espresso [info]	Cafe [info]	Overall [info]
Baratti & Milano†	Piazza Castello, 27/29	Torino	7.60	8.50	8.050
Caffè Al Bicerin	Piazza della Consolata, 5	Torino	6.00	7.20	6.600
Caffè Carpano	Via Nizza, 224	Torino	8.00	8.20	8.100
Caffè Mulassano†	Piazza Castello, 15	Torino	8.40	8.20	8.300
Caffè Platti†	Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, 72	Torino	7.50	8.00	7.750
Caffè San Carlo	Piazza San Carlo, 156	Torino	7.00	8.50	7.750
Caffè Torino	Piazza San Carlo, 204	Torino	7.90	8.20	8.050
Caffè Vittorio Veneto	Via Po, 52/E	Torino	7.00	7.80	7.400
Neuv Caval’d Brôns†	Piazza San Carlo, 155	Torino	7.20	8.50	7.850
San Tommaso 10	Via San Tommaso, 10	Torino	8.20	8.30	8.250
Torrefazione Contrada San Filippo	Via Maria Vittoria, 21/A	Torino	8.00	7.80	7.900
Ben Tivoglio Cafè	Corso Nino Bixio, 44	Alba	7.70	8.50	8.100
Caffè Calissano	Piazza Risorgimento, 3	Alba	6.60	8.00	7.300
Casa del Caffè Vergnano	Via Cavour, 11	Alba	7.10	7.80	7.450
Golosi di Salute	Piazza Rossetti, 6	Alba	7.70	8.50	8.100
Pasticceria Cignetti	Via Vittoria Emanuele II, 3	Alba	7.00	7.00	7.000
Vincafè	Via Vittorio Emanuele II, 12	Alba	7.00	7.00	7.000
Bar Lo Stregatto	Via dei Cappellai, 1	Asti	7.00	7.50	7.250
Caffè Ponchione	Corso Vittorio Alfieri, 149	Asti	7.80	8.00	7.900
Pasticceria Converso Bra†	Via Vittorio Emanuele II, 199	Bra	8.30	8.50	8.400
Guido Ristorante Pollenzo	Via Fossano, 19	Pollenzo	7.50	8.20	7.850
Strumia†	Via Vittorio Emanuele II, 9	Sommariva del Bosco	8.20	8.00	8.100

† — Rated one of the top 18 cafés in all Italy by the 2007 & 2008 Bar d’Italia del Gambero Rosso (3 tazzine and 3 chicchi)

I’ve been planning another road trip to Torino this October — my first since 2004. The wine and food are always excellent, the tourists are hard to come by (you can have an Italian city of almost a million people to yourself), Juventus is back in Serie A (and yesterday started the season off smashingly), and Torino always beckons with so many notable and good cafés. Like my travels to Portugal last year, this time I plan to take better notes about the espresso around town and in the neighboring countryside.

To help me do that, I recently picked up a copy of the Bar d’Italia del Gambero Rosso 2007 — an annual, 368-page guide to some of the best espresso bars on the Peninsula (the 2008 version of this guide is due out in early October). In case by “bar” you’re thinking of the drunken taverns here with terrible Bunn warmer coffee for designated drivers, in Italy a bar is more like an espresso bar with a liquor license. Hence why the term barista quite literally translates to “bartender”.

The “red shrimp”?!?

Gambero Rosso is a leading source for Italian gourmands, with Slow Food affiliations and a variety of publications that review the local food, wine, gelato, grappa, and everything in between. Think of them as a less stuffy Michelin Guide that concerns itself less with hotels and more than just restaurants. Many cafés in Italy also take great Michelin-star-like pride in their Gambero Rosso ratings; as an example, Gran Caffè Belli in Amandola, in the Le Marche region of central Italy, posted color scans of their 2003 & 2004 Gambero Rosso reviews on their Web site.

But instead of Michelin stars, Gambero Rosso awards bars up to three chicchi (or coffee beans) and three tazzine (or small coffee cups). The coffee beans are a measure of espresso quality, with a secondary influence of how it is served. The coffee cups represent a more complex judgment on the place, including the quality of any food offered, the level of service, the atmosphere, its cleanliness, the alcohol served, etc. They are a bit like the ratings on CoffeeRatings.com, with the beans representing the Espresso Score and the cups loosely representing the Cafe Score. But unlike CoffeeRatings.com, just getting listed in the Gambero Rosso guide is an honor in itself.

For some points of reference, here’s how some of Italy’s more famous cafés (err, bars) — and cafés with Bay Area connections — stack up:

The guide is far from perfect. I question how tough the standards are to achieve 3 chicchi — standards for espresso at the high end in Italy being notably lower than those in the States. But while Caffè Florian’s two chicchi rating seems ridiculously generous, sensibly Milan is lacking 3 chicchi candidates — with Gattullo and Pasticceria Marchesi as the lone exceptions. (Milan is one of Italy’s biggest espresso disappointments.)

In the end, it’s a very good guide — albeit available only in Italian — to keep you from drinking “average” espresso in Italy (which is still pretty damn good). I strongly recommend it for traveling espressophiles in Italy, even if you know very little Italian. It is almost as informative as the Ristoranti d’Italia del Gambero Rosso 2007 (also only available in Italian), the restaurant review equivalent which I recently picked up at the A. Cavalli & Co. Italian Bookstore in North Beach.

Given how hard it is to find Italian publications in the States, your best option to purchase a copy of the Bar d’Italia will likely be to order it over the Internet. The best deal I could find (better than the slow/non-existent e-mail response from Gambero Rosso — it’s August — and their €65,00 shipping) was from the Internet Bookshop, ibs.it (think Italy’s answer to Amazon.com), for €10,00 plus €12,60 for FedEx shipping that will get it to your door within a week. (This from personal experience.)

Swinging a dead cat for a good café in Torino

On the subject of Torino, it has plenty of representatives in Bar d’Italia. Torino has so many good cafés to choose from, the city has engendered an environment of competition through specialization. There the “café lifestyle” has taken on a diversity that is almost unparalleled.

To explain what this means in local terms, here in SF you have so much competition among good restaurants that almost no one serves “Italian” food anymore: restaurants here now specialize in regions such as Campania, Sardinia, Liguria, Venezia, Piemonte, or even Italian seafood. And of the 19 cafés in all of Italy [PDF, 152kb] awarded both Gambero Rosso’s 3 chicchi and 3 tazzine in 2007, four are in Torino — no other city has more than one. Two additional cafés are from the Piemonte region, for which Torino is the “state” capital. (Italy is made up of twenty different regions, each with a regional capital.)

With little margin between the best espresso quality in town, Torino cafés compete in ambiance by attaching themselves to film museums, libraries, the narrow basements of old buildings from the Roman settlement era, perfume shops in a private homes, places where Mini Coopers sped across marble-floored hallways in the original 1969 The Italian Job, and mothership cafés for Lavazza, Illy, etc. They should offer plenty for me to absorb while wigged out for several days on a caffeine bender.