Espresso News and Reviews – TheShot.coffeeratings.com

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.) [...]

Back to our Espresso in Torino and Piemonte series, today we return to Torino’s “living room” for classic grand café style at Caffè Torino. We touched on this café last year when writing about the coffee at the 2006 Winter Olympic Games. Like other grand cafés on the square, there’s seating in the piazza outside. [...]

As for the next installment in our Espresso in Torino and Piemonte series, this time we’re breaking out the big guns. This grand café on the grand Piazza San Carlo is as grand as anything on Venice’s Piazza San Marco. And this square marks the home of a few notable grand cafés in Torino — [...]

It’s been a long time coming. After three years of laziness, I found a clean way to add non-SF espresso bars to the online database without having them muck up the SF sorts and ratings. It’s not a lot, and there are still a few kinks to work out, but it’s progress. And the timing [...]

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 [...]

Here’s an appropriate story, given my current location in Alba, Piemonte — about 40 miles from Torino. Earlier this week, Reuters published an article on Michele Mastrantuono, one of Lavazza‘s official coffee tasters: A day in the life of an Italian coffee taster | Lifestyle | Living | Reuters. Mr. Mastrantuono performs quality control on [...]

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), [...]

Two years ago when I visited the San Tommaso café in Torino, the birthplace of Lavazza, they were promoting a menu item called espesso that wasn’t exactly what you’d expect. “Espresso in Italy? How crazy is that?!” But hold on… Note that what we call espresso here in America is called simply a café in [...]