Lots of people in this lamentable world are up to no good. In a diabolic cubicle somewhere, someone is busily conjuring up next-generation bomb technology. Somewhere else, a cynic is figuring out where to tap the next huge store of crude oil, to be sold at great profit by an oil company that won't be responsible for the carbon it releases.
Right now, someone is mindlessly sidling up to a car-dealership counter, about to pay big bucks for a monstrous SUV -- perhaps a hokey E85 one. Or plotting some unspeakable -- and no doubt quite profitable -- betrayal.
Then there's the folks who get up and go to work and do ... what all day? Those mid-level types in giant corporate and government cube farms, not the ones making or executing the evil decisions, but the ones who sit around all day pecking at their keyboards -- what is it that they do, again?
Seems insane to me, this vast effort and energy spent going to and fro, all to such ambiguous end.
The obsessives portrayed in Wednesday's New York Times Dining in/Dining Out section -- New York espresso nerds and a mad-genuis Catalan chef -- seem much more benign to me. Perhaps we have something to learn from them.
New York is a pretty grim place to get a cup of coffee. Generally, you've got your deli swill, and you've got your computer-programmed corporate swill. Neither will really do, not even in a pinch.
Luckily, as NYT's Peter Meehan documents, a tiny vanguard of committed baristas are opening shops there.
They tend to be from Seattle, they tend to set up shop either in the East Village or Williamsburg, Brooklyn, they tend to be heavily tattooed, and they're all absolutely obsessed with the details of pulling a proper espresso shot.
I've been to two of the cafes Meehan profiles: Ninth Street Espresso in the East Village and Gimme Coffee! in Williamsburg. I can testify the espresso shots they're pulling in those places are breathtaking: dense, concentrated, not bitter at all, full of flavors like chocolate, caramelized sugar: not delivered by some unspeakable flavored syrup, just precisely calibrated steam forced through a precisely calibrated "puck" of ground coffee.
And the guys who pull the shots, well, they're serious fellows. You might get a bright smile from a Starbucks worker walking the company line, but the guys in NY's new-wave coffeehouses are too busy frowning at the espresso machine, fussing over the shot, for such niceties.
Here's the sort of thing Sheehan gleaned from them for his story:
If they can, cafes will adjust the temperature on their machines to match the coffee they're brewing. Gimme! brews its house blend, Leftist, at 198 degrees. Ninth Street Espresso, which has been featuring beans from the North Carolina cafe Counter Culture Coffee for the past few weeks, has turned up the setting to 203 degrees from 201.5 degrees. Baristas decide on temperatures after cupping (lingo for tasting) a few rounds of a specific coffee brewed at a range of temperatures.
I'm well aware of the environmental and economic ravages our coffee fetish wreaks in the global south. Gregory Dicum, writing in the Spring 2003 Gastronomica (reprinted here) documented them quite well. (Every cup of coffee you drink, he writes, "represents a plot of land a little bigger than [a standard] magazine.")
Yet if we drink it as mindfully these NY coffee guys demand that we do (and you really wouldn't want more than two of their shots per day), and if we buy fair trade and organic, than it's probably a sustainable indulgence. Right?
Meanwhile, over in Spain's Catalan coast, a chef named Ferran Adria spends his days conjuring new ways to astonish and flummox his patrons. The great Mark Bittman, author of the Times' weekly "Minimalist" cooking column and many indispensable cookbooks, has a brief profile of Adria in Wednesday's Times.
In 1997, Michelin awarded Adria's then-obscure restaurant with a third star, its highest rating. The high-end food world has never been the same again. Transforming unlikely stuff like scallops into foam -- a practice now widely imitated -- is the least of Adria's provocations.
Here are some others: a chicken curry in which the chicken is liquid and the curry is solid. "Parmeson snow, served in a stylishly wrapped plastic-foam box -- the better to keep it cold -- and topped with of all things, muesli with dried fruit."
"Caviar" -- made from olive oil. Properly for a Spaniard, Adria is particularly enamored of the olive as medium. In one dish, he also liquifies olives, puts them through God knows what machine, and transforms them into olive-shaped orbs with a microthin skin -- of solidified olive juice.
Adria spends his winters holed up in a Barcelona lab with his brother, "experimenting" with food to create his dishes. Would you rather have this mad man working on, say, the next cluster bomb?
Adria, like NY's new-wave baristas, is earnestly making art out of what seems at first glance as the mundane, the quotidian. ("Adria doesn't rely at all on fancy ingredients," Bittman reports.)
To answer a recent question posed by David Roberts about happiness vs. GDP, if our vast horde of cube dwellers and evildoers began to devote themselves to similar pursuits, we'd have a more benign, and less toxic, society.
Comments
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gregs Posted 12:38 pm
14 Sep 2006
http://theshot.coffeeratings.com/2006/09/lavazza-espesso/
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caniscandida Posted 1:34 pm
14 Sep 2006
True, we make our own coffee, at home: French roast, strong, in a drip pot. We are satisfied, and we do not serve it to anyone else.
And by the same token, I mistrust coffee elsewhere, and prefer to order tea, or pop, or wine.
Still, surely the coffee situation in NYC is not so dismal as Tom asserts. Back when I was working in downtown Brooklyn, I was very happy with a caffe` americano at the Starbucks across from the courthouse.
How do you Americans drink espresso, anyway? Why do you refer to a demitasse as a "shot"? Espresso evolved in Italian cuisine and culture to fit the right kind of dining situation at the right time of day. Outside of that context, there is no espresso.
So I freely admit, I am totally clueless on American coffee-drinking habits. Obviously, though, those habits, preferences and fashions have always had a major impact on the economies of the coffee-bean-growing countries to the south, and that remains a matter of concern. Let us hope that, bit by bit, "organic," "fair-trade" and "shade-grown" coffee will increase their share in the North American market.
On Senyor Adria': It should be noted that though Catalunya is politically part of Spain, it is historically and culturally a quite separate region, with a quite self-consciously separate identity from that of the bleak Castilian interior. So, to speak of the cuisine of a chef in Barcelona as "Spanish" lacks some essential nuance.
Barcelona is a great western Mediterranean port, and dining there has more in common with dining at the tables of Marseille and Genova and Napoli and Palermo than Madrid. To be sure, it has always been more cosmopolitan, and Adria''s creativity is in principle not surprising.
One important difference between Barcelona and the interior is that it is perfectly easy to be a piscivorous vegetarian there, and to eschew carnivory altogether; in Aragon and Castilla, by contrast, parts of pigs and cattle follow you everywhere.
Our happiest meals in Spain are always in the coastal regions: Catalunya, the Basque provinces, Galicia. In cities inland, we end up in pizzerias.
To be fair, we are not well acquainted with Andalucia. It is possible that there are good cuisines there which are not meat-centered.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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Tom Philpott Posted 11:19 pm
14 Sep 2006
Glad it made you happy; sounds pretty grim to me. Did you frequent Sahadi's around the corner--not for coffee but for groceries and prepared food? Now that place made me happy.
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accel2 Posted 12:45 am
15 Sep 2006
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kmp Posted 1:52 am
15 Sep 2006
Luckily, I used to work in Tarrytown and we had Coffee Labs. Here is a link to a CoffeeGeek discussion of the place.... I could not find a web-site. Suffice it to say that it is independently owned, they roast beans on-site, all beans are some combination of organic, fair trade, bird friendly, etc. The shop itself is cozy, they have live music at night, and generally several puppy dogs wandering through during the day (the "Labs" in Coffee Labs a play on Labrador retriever). Oh yeah, and the coffee is great. In fact, I still drive down there to buy my coffee beans for home.
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Tom Philpott Posted 2:22 am
15 Sep 2006
Gorilla is pretty good, but not close to the level of 9th Street or Gimme. The less said about Ozzie's, the better. I'm not familiar with Flying Saucer.
Cheers,
TP
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mihan Posted 3:49 am
15 Sep 2006
As for NYC, I try to avoid it, but if I am unable I will bear gimme in mind.
I had read about these chefs before, and frankly the food sounded unappetizing to me. But I'm a traditional girl.
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Roz Cummins Posted 7:19 am
15 Sep 2006
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kmp Posted 1:39 am
18 Sep 2006
Coffee Connection was fantastic, and the owner held out against the Starbucks offers to buy them out for so long... but eventually, even CC fell to the green machine. :(
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