Le coffeeing
August 9, 2010 – 8:16 am 
half-pound bison burger, emmental, garlic shoots, pico de gallo, quail egg. and coffee — square mile’s kenya tegu.
it’s barely a stretch — a counter-stretch! — to say high-end coffee learns a lot from trending food movements. this blog wonders if it’s not missing the cuttingest parts, though.
– credit card points took us to montana, domicile of the barista-poet. the green coffee truck still exists. right next to the chicken coop and splendorous, black-earth garden. there’s a former pirate next door. a lot of bears. neighborhood pubs breweries, and glaciers just to the north.
in missoula, they have a culture of dive bars, and, as it happens, dive cafes. establishments that are uniquely local, but decidedly poor in terms of beverages. the food, though. you might go to the place where the Savoriest Pizza Ever blows your mind with artichoke hearts and sausages. it’s the most montana of pies. you might head to one of three simultaneous farmer’s markets and buy local grass-fed bison, top it with garlic shoots, sauce it up with a fried quail egg. you might buy a pack of moose drool, a respectable craft brown ale — but in cans, the better to float down the river with.
these things are both distinctly of the place and downright good, by any measure. these things would by no means be classified as snobby indulgences, or geek pursuits. food, in this instance, has advanced beyond class symbols and is able to be both unpretentious and eminently laudable.
does coffee do this? rarely. the current version of the worthy coffee shop seems like it’s forced to be either the ultra-cool status symbol — intellivenice, say — or scruffy, neighborhood minded and with coffee that looks like it.
there are exceptions, but they glare so brightly as to make the norm obvious.
– le fooding has become an obsession — a franco-american food movement that seems to encapsulate so much of what the youngsters long for. excellence. spontaneity. flexibility. without hard rules and accredited certificates. food for the people, a little bit cheeky, and very attractive. it’s all about the context — chipotle can soar — and about making it diverse and accessible without pretension. it’s about eating and experimenting with the right attitude.
can coffee do this? yes, sometimes. this blog might argue (if it thinks hard enough) that the most liked coffee gurus in the current movement are those who exude some aspect of this excellence with attitudinal everymanism. hoffmann. owens. colin. peter g. and yet they, too, seem to wear an attitude that’s an exception rather than a characteristic trait.
the cranky scientists, haughty geeks and argumentative snobs are vastly more common. and they’re not connecting coffee to anything.
– here in the sweltering southern hinterlands, people are discovering farmer’s markets and course meals and bistro cooking like it’s sarah palin, and instantly turning them all into cliches. conversational trading cards. a nouveau legalism. which is all insufferably deplorable, of course, but the upside is, well, that there are now exploding farmer’s markets and seasonal bistros for the NASCAR fan with an adventurous streak.
like cullen’s. its local organic pork belly and coastal scallops on crocodile spinach — and for much less money than the status restaurants — are wont to make this blog unusually gushy. seasonal crepes, farm-inspired sides, dessert imaginations born of real limits, they’re all here. and somehow this place, with its budget decor and handful of tables, has managed to put a real dent in the local dining consciousness within a matter of months.
not by boasting, or being ostentatiously purist, or situating themselves where greenies might notice. they’ve done it just by being very, very good — and not even original, per se. it’s classic french cooking with modern twists and variations inspired by local seasons. it’s the way farm to table was meant to be. i daresay it even makes sense to a domino’s-addicted redneck.
is coffee doing this? doesn’t seem like it. instead of working within simple limits, allowing humble strictures to force creativity and better delivery, the good shops seem to be sprawling all over the place, offering so many coffees now the customer can’t keep track of them all, so many drinks they jumble all up on the menu. the coffee is exotic, the names multitudinous, the brewing devices scary and the sensory overload just enough to cause a regular person to have a meltdown and opt for a smoothie. the approach deprives one of the simple, local flavor of a thing. it bludgeons taste with options.
…
all of which to say, public coffee is getting better. fine shops are sprouting everywhere. people are becoming discerning. but the examples of “good” seem to be examples of coffee being fetishized, a codified end in itself. the attitude is often stifling, the cafe exalted to a status where lovers go drooly and haters hate. backlashes take shape, and the quality divides instead of unifying. it’s all “slow food,” which is nice but legalistic, instead of “le fooding,” which is open and scalable.
you know what this means, don’t you? it means this blog had a smashing time in montana, and thought so many interrelated thoughts that it must resort to bulleting them in meandering blog posts. so much was absorbed about radical communities and home brewing and mountain lions and huckleberries, it might be enough to get us hyperventilating again …
UPDATE: a fulsome, conversation-lengthening response from james hoffmann here.
Blog post: Le coffeeing http://www.chemicallyimbalanced.org/2010…
Blog post:: Le coffeeing http://www.chemicallyimbalanced.org/2010…
You need to post more. Especially when the posts are this good.
I’ll come up with a proper response soon, but you’ve really nailed it here.
RT @sprobro: blog post:: Le coffeeing http://www.chemicallyimbalanced.org/2010…
Hmm, you now have me third-guessing if five coffees at one time on our menu is far, far too many.
Oh to be on the list of “excellance with attitudinal everymanism”. Everyone can dream…
Good post.
I think you’re missing the reality of our society swimming in entertainment, and yet we act as if we were all entertainment-deprived.
Kids cannot sit idly by at adult gatherings without some gadgetry to continuously consume their attention. We have car manufacturers slapping DVD players in the backs of headrests, for crying out loud.
Meanwhile, it’s not uncommon to find newly dating couples making only occasional glances at each other over supposedly romantic dinners — while they each blissfully thumb away on their respective mobile Facebook updates and Twitter feeds with all their friends who are somewhere else, far far away from the event.
Then take food media: TV, magazines, events. Unlike the cooking TV shows of the past, it’s not just a spectator sport anymore because the active part is in the consuming — not just in the making — of the end-product.
Much of what you seem to consider the cuttingest parts strike me as a big ball of food entertainment fun. Sure, we want better food. But a big part of that is we want to play and have fun in the process. Hence the emphasis on experimenting. It’s not about the cuttingist of anything. It’s more akin to kids in a sandbox playing with beach toys than it is about any culinary progression per se.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. People having fun participate, provide economic support, and keep the engine of improvement going. But let’s put this playfulness in the right context here. What’s considered “good” is always being fetishized — with food or coffee.
ben: it would be hard to discern your place on a list of excellent everymen with a closed twitter feed.
i’m the last person who should suggest a number of coffees ideal to offer at once. but the labeling/presentation would seem to have a lot to do with it. for example, square mile’s offerings seem “about right,” but then that seems to have everything to do with how those coffees are presented online and accessed via the labels.
greg: fascinating comment. and normally, i’d be glad to heap scorn on the effects of today’s consumers demanding cheap thrills.
but that’s not really what i’m talking about. le fooding, as an analogy, is not at all about “food entertainment fun.” instead, it’s quality that’s accessible. it IS food that is “of its time,” but it insists on excellence, is open as to how this might be achieved and welcoming in terms of who may participate.
i’ve heard it said that a characteristic of true literary genius (let’s take shakespeare) is the ability to make accessible the finest art to the masses. the bard didn’t just revolutionize the elite theater-going set, he wrote dramas so compelling that they were felt by people of any class, and he ultimately opened the theater to the riffraff. it really boils down to how much you love your audience.
that what the people of le fooding do. they take food seriously, but not themselves. they insist on an attitude that is open and humbly investigative instead of rigid and static. they understand what it takes to keep a movement relevant.
experimenting isn’t just play — not serious, results-oriented experimenting anyway. it’s paying attention to how the coffee relates, tweaking it with an eye for how it will be consumed. this is just others-mindedness.
modern entertainment culture actually hollows a thing by fetishizing it and then discarding it quickly. i’m actually talking about the exact opposite — valuing a thing for what it is, and exploring it endlessly for what it can mean to people.
You are tapping some deep wells of meaning here: ‘how much you love your audience’ & ‘others-mindedness’ seem to go against the flow of the society that Greg portrays. I’m quite certain that I heard Scott Lucey talk about ‘servant leadership’ in his USBC presentation and the phrase (and the man) haunts me when I try to make sense out of what kind of movement (counter-flow?) I want to align my thought and practice with.
The only thing I have to throw in the ring is that while a few commenters used the word ‘industry’, you seem to stick with the idea of a ‘movement’ or just plain ‘coffee’. Is there a distinction between the movement and the industry? I’m sure most of the food in le fooding is still bought and sold, but it’s the spirit/attitude of abundance and generosity (deep meaning and good humor) that seem to take Shakespear’s stage.
What this movement needs is a good syphon vid.
Le Fooding may be about accessibility of good food, but remember that its a movement constructed in direct response to the ideal that the Michelin-driven world is old, stodgy, and inaccessible.
Despite their short-attention-span infatuation with the expensive espresso machine fad du jour, the pour-over alternative of the month, and an occasional unhealthy obsession over Cup of Excellence coffees at the expense of their peers, the quality coffeeshops of today cannot be fairly compared with the Michelin school of French cuisine.
Despite their infatuation with status symbols, and their bludgeoning the public with options in the absence of real taste-making, these coffeeshops are not embracing the old arts and the culturally “inaccessible”. Thus a reaction of the kind that Le Fooding makes doesn’t really seem necessary. The over-abundance of options makes ‘accessibility’ a problem for these coffeeshops rather than a goal. We might have newspapers complaining about the $5 cup of pour-over coffee, but it’s not like nobody can afford the experience.
jon:
exactly. i’m convinced we’re talking about completely different things.
ha. been telling my post-production expert that for weeks. it’ll land. it’ll land.
greg:
you seem pretty cynical, and maybe that’s why you’re so tempted to dismiss this idea. i, for one, don’t see how current pour-over methods are a fad, for example. i’m surprised you didn’t mention latte art or something. but pour-overs? you’re really losing me there. surely you can’t disagree that there’s a purist, back-to-basics appeal there … anything but a fad.
i wasn’t actually thinking of modern coffee shops as the equivalent of michelin food. instead, i was thinking more in terms of slow food — a laudable movement, but a fairly narrow one. although i personally like the ideas behind it, the movement is without question something with limited relevance to modern life. many of its tenets simply aren’t scalable and universally possible (though, again, i’m a fan and a believer). it seems (happily) consigned to the pursuit of some thoughtful souls, and based on pretty non-negotiable ideas. that’s fine. but it’s not widely impactful to society the way a more attitude-based movement would be.
instead, my thought is that coffee can adapt better than that. if we can avoid being curmudgeonly head-knockers about our coffee — while opening eyes with quality that’s humble, simple and accessible — then i say the movement will be profoundly more meaningful to people. not in a wham-bang, infotainment way, but in a piercing, open-ended way that draws people in.
over-abundance does not equal accessibility. again, i argue the opposite: the choices often fail to understand the customer, and thus hamper true accessibility.
A quick response (without proper time available at the moment to develop it into a well thought out one) to what I’ve read so far:
Both you and Mr. Hoffman are hitting on points that I’ve been worrying myself over quite a bit lately. There’s a lot of off-putting over-eagerness surrounding specialty coffee that has made the movement an easy target for dismissal as a hipster trend.
Delicious, specialty coffee is a relatively recent phenomenon and some folk are rightly excited by it. The trouble is, there is a lot of hyperactive hollering going on, and quite a few well meaning people going off half cocked.
The important differentiation I would make between “le fooding” and the current coffee environment is: training. Any worthy chef has a background in technique that definitely has no current equivalent in coffee.
Years are spent learning classic and basic cooking technique until a cook can move into the role of chef and begin to either deconstruct an established cuisine, or to strike out on a tangent that has the appeal noted in your article.
This can happen with quiet confidence, because the chef sits on a firm foundation of perfected technique. How many coffee houses can you mention in similar vein?
Thanks, and I always thoroughly dig your posts.
wait – coffee bloggers are talking about topics I actually care about? what kind of bizarro universe did I wake up in???
I’ll concur with much of what is being said here and elsewhere. my own thoughts on this are pretty harsh and generally unkind toward to many colleagues and friends. suffice to say, we all have a *long* way to go in the cup before we’ve earned much more time on the high horse.
response to ben
This has been racking my brain for days now! And in all honesty both this and James’ post took me multiple attempts before I could get through and finish the whole thing. I often stopped afraid it was “just another rant”.
I don’t disagree one bit with any of the logic behind your comparisons, and actually find them valuable to know more about advancing our own specialty industry, but what I’m moved to say is I think these conversations quickly turn into ones that produce nothing good.
Like you said…. “not connecting coffee to anything.” – I know this wasn’t a post about connecting coffee to anything, but still… the spirit of these conversations quickly bruise. “These conversations” are great, but when they happen I find more value when there’s more positive suggestion than not. The anit-syrup, anti-customizaion, overly intellectual barista is only fueled and in my opinion, doesn’t need to be.
I keep thinking long and hard about the perfect response that sends people away thinking about how they might change their attitude for the better or any way that’s a positive solution to this “slow/low accessibility” topic. Whatever it is, it’s asking for more careful expression of opinions and more intention to impact people (consumers & industry members) in the most positive way.
To do so I thought it great to offer up another parallel – the bartender. So many out there, so many varying levels of quality, bartenders mirror their establishemnts which can also mirror the quality of the product they put out. And in that industry, there are some real gems, ones you trust and ones you just say – make me something good, something with ____ in it. The best cocktail experience ever.
In discussing my thoughts on this I was quickly turned to the “about me” section of a local and amazing bartener, my favorite part about his bio is this,
“As mentioned above, I am a bartender…not ”bar-chef,” not ”chef,” not ”mixologist,” not ”stir-mix-a lot”…just bartender, please and thank you. I take all aspects of my job very seriously and mixing or creating cocktails would fall third in the list of my job priorities…behind service and maintaining a comfortable environment for the patrons. I will not laugh or make you feel like an idiot if you want a apple or chocolate martini(anything ”tini” for that matter), flavored vodka and sprite, a fist bump delivered with your Jager Bomb, muddled fruit and 7-up in your old fashioned(Chad: Did you say you wanted that with Korbel Brandy sir? Patron: Yes please, and could you top it off with sour soda this time? Chad: No problem, it will be right up).”
(the rest can be found at http://thirdcoastcocktails.wordpress.com/about/ – browse the blog as wel for some great drink ideas and the stories behind them)
)on pointed the finger at me in his comment, and I’m glad he did so, it’d sealed the deal that I express my opinion rather than suppress. It’s all about the servant leadership. There are plenty of reasons the food industry is more accessible and supposedly advancing faster than the coffee industry, shoot, people are dying because they abuse the way they eat, movies are being made with the attempt to change the way people think about food. Eating is a life necessity, to neglect is to die (exaggerated but true). Our specialty industry is very different than the greater food industry and it’s also a difficult thing to advance because we have the commercial non-specialty industry attached to our hip (it’s all coffee isn’t it?) (no, but they will argue that point).
The specialty industry isn’t going anywhere w/ out more servant leadership – people conscious of the way they talk, the tone their attitude takes, who’re they’re talking to, etc…. It’s so important to know when to stop and when not to complain and how to choose what you say to who. Writing’s like this are honest and valid, but there’s too much potential to fuel anti this and anti that conversations that spend more time talking about why things aren’t working rather than what is working and how we can get more of it.
One thing that I try to keep in mind when pondering our “industry” or “movement” or the “Le Anything” thing is that our segment is extremely immature in development: we’re at the very beginnings. Cuisine has so much going for it because it’s been going on for so long. Fine dining has been with us for over three hundred years. Fine coffees prepared by skilled craftsmen has been with us, for what, eighty years? Barely twenty, if you base it on the current generation of “barista”.
Perhaps what causes this herky-jerky incongruence in our industry is that shops lack the vision and direction of a strong “barista”. Within cuisine, a restaurant is led by a chef – a person that dictates the vision and cuisine of that restaurant. How is this handled in our segment of the industry? By committee? By “management”? By people who don’t really have a strong vision of what they’re doing?
I’ve long been excited by people such as Pierre Gagnaire, Gordon Ramsay and Thomas Keller because they lead their restaurants with such strong vision. Within our own world of “barista” there is a notable lack of visionary leadership, which is why I’m excited by the work of people like John Piquet of Caffe d’Bolla in Salt Lake City and Anthony Rue of Volta Coffee in Gainesville. Both are baristas leading their shops with vision and their interpretation of coffee.
Many coffee shops, even the “best” shops in the world, merely serve “coffee”. Without a doubt, much of this coffee is excellent, but what is differentiating factor? What is the vision that sets them apart? Perhaps once we start to see more true “baristas” emerging and leading their own shops we will see something worthy of getting excited about.
On a side note, and because I know chances are that he’ll read this – I certainly am looking forward to the day that Jon Lewis decides to forge out on his own and open his own coffee place. I’m betting that his place will be an experience worth traveling to visit.
Great post, Ben (and James, by extension). Got me thinking a lot about the current trends we see in coffee.
Zooming out to about 20,000 feet I get the sense that what we’re seeing in our little corner of the forest is the technician-afication of our processes. We’re bringing high technology to bear on our craft. This is neither good nor bad on its own. It’s only a comment on the MoJo’ed, pressure profiled, temp stabilized we find so often in the cutting edge places. (I don’t include myself in those vaunted circles, only to note that I’m currently working on week three of an experiment to observe and possibly stabilize Buono water temps for pour-overs.)
But is this the end of it? Is this the destination? I don’t think so. The goal for me in my own tiny place is to become so good with the technology crutches (the temp probe, the the flow-restrictors in the Buono, the timers, etc.) that I can eventually ditch them. They are indeed crutches if one allows them to be. They are training wheels to a larger arena, not the arena themselves. (I sometimes find myself worried when I have to make three V60′s concurrently and I only have two scales.)
My point is that I think we can rightly be viewed as being in transition. I don’t think the science experiment as coffee bar is the final pinnacle. I hope not. It’s currently fashionable, just as bare concrete and exposed wood beams in the home are. It’s not accessible enough. It’s cool, but in so being it’s almost cold, in my opinion. Ultimately it’s not “home” enough. It’s the girl you’d like to date versus the girl you need to marry, if you will.
I hope I can get to the place I don’t need (and don’t need my customers to see) all the gadgetry–that it looks flawless and is perfect and deceptively simple.
Not fully formed thoughts, here. Only to say that accessibility vis-a-vis our customers should feel more comfortable and less stodgy and bulky and tech-dependent. Here’s hoping that aspect of our trade is only passing.
I think as much as le fooding should be our goal as far as customers perceive us from an accessibility standpoint, perhaps the micro/craft/local brewery and craft beer bar scene would be a more apt and achievable goal. I for one have never felt like a beer was being shoved down my throat(I mean in terms of those worth drinking; I exclude the Busch/Miller/Michelobs, et al from this premise). Beer is very approachable, their are few barriers to entry, and good beer is “common without being commonplace”(to quote Nick’s comment from James’ blog).
As an industry, how do we achieve this? I guess that brings us right back to the beginning. How do we get to the point when a high quality coffee is as accessible as a great local IPA? How has beer gotten to this point(this is a valid question, I am too young to remember a point when a good microbrewed beer was a rare commodity)?
I think about all of this stuff a lot, but I’m not going to have time to write much (coherent) about the subject. I worked a closing shift and got home seven hours ago; now it is 7am and I’m heading out to the market to see what is available, and then back to Volta to meet with one of my baking staff to plan the day’s menu. It’s not that I’m playing to your sympathies; it’s that in the three years since I made my first public post about coffee here on BZ’s blog (and received essential responses from )on and m’lissa) my life has been turned upside down by the coffee bean and it’s just about all that I think about these days.
For me, the problem the coffee is three-fold: trust, context, and (because old habits die hard) an unvoiced hegemonic common sense about both coffee and the cafe business that needs to be dismantled one cup at a time.
Trust: (a long digression). Before I opened Volta, I spent almost a decade on the board of directors of a local organic CSA. I planted onions and potatoes in the middle of miserable Florida heat and helped pack out the market shares. Mostly, though, I developed marketing materials to raise awareness about local sustainable agriculture. The problem we faced was that north central Florida has all but lost its tradition of market-focused farmers. We’re surrounded by thousand acre agricultural factories focused on monocrop production (potatoes, melons, early season blueberries, commodity milk). For most of the last decade, if you wanted a restaurant that was market-centric and seasonal, you had to be ready to serve nothing but greens, peppers, and squash for most of the year. At first we were the only CSA– and the only farm providing a wide assortment of possible veggies. We had to build a market for every heirloom variety (of almost anything) that was planted. After a few years another CSA started up and found success. Now there are a dozen our so at the market, plus a growing number of non-CSA farms willing to branch out and try planting crops that haven’t been in the soil around here for generations. Last year, just as the market seemed on the verge of a tipping point, the market managers decided to take advantage of the crowds that the CSAs had been able to attract by (surreptitiously) allowing produce jobbers to set up astroturf stands selling commercial/global produce from the wholesale markets in Tampa and Orlando. It was a disaster for the market. The concept of local/seasonal went out the window as you really didn’t know if the tomato you were buying was from five miles away or five thousand. It didn’t hurt the CSAs so much– our shares were presold before the planting season– but it did damage attendance. Mostly, it reinforced a measure of cynicism in the casual buyer/consumer– a cynicism that will hurt both the farmers and the restaurants that have tried to use market-driven sustainability as a marker of quality.
I think about what happened at the market every time I get a call from a roaster wanting to send me samples. I view my relationship with the roasters that we use is very much like a CSA: although I’m not pre-buying the coffee for the year, I trust them to be at the farm evaluating lots and conditions. They are the single link between me and the farmer. The transparency that I care about is not about finances but rather about quality. I need to trust that I’m buying from a roaster who is able to verify quality of growing conditions, harvest, milling, storage, and transport. Without _that_ context, I can’t present the coffee in my cafe in a way that is anything _but_ a cup of coffee. And if you are reading this far, I can assume you realize that’s the last thing I am interested in. It’s not a coincidence that the attitudinal everymen BZ canonizes work for roasters with similar concerns. As a cafe owner, there’s not a week that I don’t get a call, sample, or email from some new “local, artisanal” roaster with their direct trade Bali Blue Moon– you know, the coffee that can increase our profit margin. And in this economy, who doesn’t need an offer like that? Like our local market, the coffee market has reached a tipping point where the work of others is attracting a market force that knows how to oil the signifiers until they are sufficiently slippery, to bamboozle both the small business cafe owners and to influence our customer base. The end result? Cynicism. An erosion of confidence in the consumer that there is a difference. Coffee is never local, so we (i.e. Volta and others who share a similar commitment) have to work all that much harder to build confidence that le fooding is even possible for us. It’s all about trust. It’s not about bartender analogies, barista pouralot servitude, or golden cup mojo-based assumptions about extractions founded on decades-old data (do you think you’d want to drink the coffee used in the foundational studies for gold cup extraction?) It’s about building a business model around coffee that treats it with as much respect as Cullen’s pork belly. It’s about working as directly as possible with the farmer, but having the flexibility to evaluate each crop individually with the knowledge that we have as culinary professionals so we can be as proud of each cup of brewed coffee as we are of a perfect rosetta. (as much as I want to continue writing about context and Gramsci, I need to run out to the produce market and compare apples and oranges.)
Two or three things that I know about le coffeeing and context.
-Common sense is a dead end.
-Give the people what they want, and they will give you money. That’s the signal the industry telegraphs to prospective cafe owners. And let’s be real, for every Ultimo or Peregrine opened by craft-respecting ex-baristas, there are a thousand shops opened by well-meaning people who just want to own their own business and think that a cafe would be a fun, social, and profitable investment. It’s why I can walk the floor at SCAA and feel like I’m not in the same business.
-This industry needs an owners guild more than it needs a barista guild.
-excellent cooks, bartenders, and waiters are essential for the success of any restaurant, but the best restaurants are most successful if they are following a script. Unfortunately, the line cooks, bartenders, and wait staff are seldom the ones writing the script.
-Baristas need to be empowered, but will seldom have power. They are more likely to be employees than owners, and no owner likes to be told that their business model is wrong. That’s a problem I see with TNTs and Camp Pullashots: if a shop is on the right track, these events are at best distractions and at worse counter to the training and tone that the owner/management/collective should be providing for themselves. If a shop is on the wrong track (vis a vie le coffeeing), these events introduce an adversarial position into the workplace that ranges from creeping hipsterism to open contempt between worker and owner.
-Once the doors are open, the die has been cast. If straight espresso sales are only 1.5% of the business after five years, they probably won’t be 5% after ten.
-The writing is on the wall: applying heat to green coffee will soon be a minor component of what we look for in a roaster. The real work that provides market differentiation will be in planting/harvesting/processing. I have seen the future, and its name is Finca Santuario.
-As roasters morph into this new identity, new business models for cafes will become more apparent. It’s all about context. Ever increasing quality of coffee will meld into presentation and service innovation. Dogma and brewing technologies are headed to the dustbin as we learn to trust our ingredients.
-Creating a successful lower volume, higher quality, higher ticket shop is entirely possible (even in the current economy), but it has to be pitch-perfect. It’s not going to come from a CoffeeFest lecture or from a bbb book. All of the very difficult decisions I made about my own shop were made months before we opened our doors.
-For my own business, I found the guiding voice to be Bob Black’s essay on the abolition of work: “Almost any evil you’d care to name comes from working or from living in a world designed for work. In order to stop suffering, we have to stop working. That doesn’t mean we have to stop doing things. It does mean creating a new way of life based on play; in other words, a ludic revolution. By “play” I mean also festivity, creativity, conviviality, commensality, and maybe even art. There is more to play than child’s play, as worthy as that is. I call for a collective adventure in generalized joy and freely interdependent exuberance. Play isn’t passive. Doubtless we all need a lot more time for sheer sloth and slack than we ever enjoy now, regardless of income or occupation, but once recovered from employment-induced exhaustion nearly all of us want to act.”
-not having fun when you have the chance to work every day with some of the world’s most amazing agricultural products = epic fail.
this is a classic blog post of someone having a lot of thoughts about something, like ‘le coffeeing’, and puts all these thoughts into writing. very impressive i may say.
but the art of making coffee is a lot more passionate and crafty. thus, making it slower to derive. experimenting is an art and one should have fun while doing it.
that my friend is the best looking burger I have ever seen. It has made me want to go out and break my diet and stuff my face with a huge burger (a few fries on the side maybe?). Its a good job its late at night here and all the shops are shut, just have to make do with some celery sticks and humus!
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Cheers,
Andrea Mitchell
Speaking of local coffee shops, I recently purchased a new Alex Duetto ii online which I promised myself to master within 1 week. Although I live a mere 40 miles from Intelligentsia I decided to contact a coffee-acquaintance, Samuel, at Arcedeum Coffee in St. Charles, IL who was kind enough to come to my house to teach me to operate the machine properly up to and including some basic latte arte. Can’t recommend the young man’s knowledge and skill enough (and the machine’s not too bad too)! tj
I really enjoy your blogs they are Jam packed with goodness like th half-pound bison burger..lol Btw if your looking for a place to buy coffe online check out http://www.locallyroastedcoffeeshop.com/ yeah its a shameless plug for my wifes cool Locally roasted coffee site
Bonjour Bruno,en effet, il y a beaucoup d’ide9es ree7ues sur le Fooding. Je piasnes que c’e9tait avant tout une marque de9pose9e (et assez surveille9e) et une socie9te9 commerciale qui marchait plutf4t bien.La vocation initiale du Michelin e9tait de guider les automobilistes pour les faire rouler et leur faire consommer des pneus… La version actuelle est un guide avec des restaurants qui sont tre8s souvent des valeurs sures (en province, le Michelin est parfois plus re9actif et mieux e9tabli et renseigne9 que le Fooding) et qui peuvent convenir e0 un public plus large que celui du Fooding.C’est sa force mais aussi, bien sur, une de ses faiblesses (une adresse qui plait assez en moyenne peut ne pas plaire beaucoup e0 certains).La convergence de se9lection entre certaines adresses Fooding et Michelin est simplement une tre8s bonne chose pour les heureux e9lus.