In "Mad Flavor," the author describes his occasional forays from the farm in search of exceptional culinary experiences from small artisanal producers. For the next week or so, Mad Flavor will be reporting from location in Austin, the author's hometown.
News flash: I've found proper espresso in Austin, Texas, home of dozens of cafes. The place is Cafe Medici, at West Lynn and 11th in Clarkesville.
Before I describe it, I'll make you sit through my pet theory on why it's getting harder and harder to find great coffee in the U.S.
I have a theory that Starbucks -- which has been busily conquering the China market and stepping on Ethiopia's intellectual property rights -- is wrecking U.S. coffee culture.
The argument is paradoxical. In its grand push for ubiquity, the company has brought drinkable -- sort of -- coffee to exurban shopping malls, supersized interstate-highway filling stations, and other unlikely places.
But the sudden ubiquity of the almost drinkable exerts deadening pressure on the actually-quite-good. Take the case of Austin, Texas, where I grew up, went to college, and spent my post-college-crisis years.
Starbucks and the triumph of the $5 milkshake
First, let's talk about the banality and inanity of Starbucks coffee "culture." Not that long ago, John Travolta cocked an eyebrow at the specter of a "$5 milkshake" in Pulp Fiction. Since then, Starbucks has turned that concept into a business valued by Wall Street at a cool $30 billion -- about twice the valuation of Ford Motor.
Walk into Starbucks now and you're confronted with a dizzying array of "latte" drinks featuring pumpkin pie, egg nog, and I'm terrified to think of what all. These revoltingly milky, sugary concoctions -- warmed-up $5 milkshakes with a dash of mediocre espresso -- would bewilder any patron or barista in the simple Italian coffee bars from which Starbucks ostensibly draws its inspiration.
Unhappily, Starbucks and its dreadful creations seem to have taught Americans what cappuccino means. I was recently at a small coffee bar on University of North Carolina's Chapel Hill campus. The place pulls a surprisingly good espresso shot, yet the undergrads were all ordering "lattes" featuring stuff like Snicker's bars. I'm not kidding.
In such a fallen coffee world, the importance of a properly pulled espresso shot from high-quality fresh beans dwindles. Why should they bother doing better, when the Starbucks-educated masses are clamoring to shell out $5 for a sweet milkshake that would overwhelm the subtlety of good espresso anyway?
Here in Austin, I've seen the best coffeehouses of my generation succumb to that impeccable logic. I won't call out names, but cafes that taught me the genius of espresso are now churning out dirty water in fancy demitasse cups.
Starbucks rode to corporate-giant status on the strength of a backlash against dull institutional coffee. Now we need a new backlash against the hegemony of the corporate giant and its dubiosly flavored lattes.
Caffe Medici: manning the ramparts
Here in Austin, Caffe Medici is manning the ramparts of that fight.
(In the ever-important fight against historical amnesia, it's important to note that Medici's central Austin neighborhood, Clarkesville, was until the 1950s an African-American enclave. But "market forces," often backed by government cash, are always pushing "undesirable" elements from the urban core to the periphery, especially when well-heeled whites rediscover the beauty of urban living.
Now Clarkesville ranks as one of Austin's trendiest, "funkiest" neighborhoods -- and, like much of this self-conciously "cool" and liberal city, it's pretty racially and economically homogenous. Now a comfortable hub of tony West Austin, Clarkesville bears no visible trace of its history as a black neighborhood.)
The espresso at Medici, while a tad light in body, is lavishly blanketed in golden-brown crema, subtly sweet, with a finish that sticks with you for minutes after you're done. In a word, it's proper, correct.
And the cappuccino is done right, too. Contra Starbucks, cappuccino does not mean equal parts hot milk, foam, and espresso. In a well-made cap, the barista steams the milk and then carefully, swirling and tapping the milk pitcher, reincorporates the foam into the hot milk, creating a creamy, cloud-like milk-foam emulsion. (The milk must be whole; a "skim cap" is a crime.)
In a good cap, the milk doesn't overwhelm the espresso; the milk provides a sweet, creamy canvass against which the espresso shines.
Medici, God bless it, serves just such a cappuccino.
Comments
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David Roberts Posted 6:18 am
27 Oct 2006
My wife works at a small coffee-importing company. I'm scared to let her read this for fear she'll take the next flight to Austin and cuckold me.
www.grist.org
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Tom Philpott Posted 6:40 am
27 Oct 2006
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Samuel Fromartz Posted 6:48 am
27 Oct 2006
Samuel Fromartz
Author
Organic Inc: Natural Foods and How They Grew (Harcourt, 2006)
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kmp Posted 7:00 am
27 Oct 2006
Years ago I was in Madrid on holiday over Thanksgiving week (a great time to travel to Europe BTW; not a single American in sight!). My Spanish was pretty limited then (and not much better now) but I still tried to be polite and speak the native tongue.
So, I sidle in a bar at about 11am (well, you know, time change, vacation, etc) with my girlfriend and it is cold & rainy and we want a drink. Seemed a bit early in the day for cerveza or Rioja and somehow we remembered how to say "Irish coffee" in Spanish: cafe Irlandes.
Little did we know that the proper construction of an Irish coffee in a Madrid bar takes approximately 25 minutes, involves a complicated array of brewing espresso, heating whiskey & sugar in a spoon, warming cream, and piling the whole concoction OH SO carefully so that the layers do not mix. It was truly fascinating to watch.
Upon finally being delivered our masterpieces, we, philistines that we were, instantly dunked a spoon in the drink and stirred. The bartender quite literally turned white with shock, yelled out a bunch of Spanish expletives and promptly took our drinks away from us. He then painstakingly and 25-minutely made us brand new Irish coffees and proceeded to instruct us (in broken Spanglish) as to how to properly drink one (you sort of sip the coffee & whiskey through the layer of cream, without disturbing any of the layers) and also to stand over us and watch us to make sure we had it right. He then refused to let us leave the bar until we had the proper pronunciation of IrLANdes (from the diaphragm, girls!).
We left him a huge tip.
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Gregory Dicum Posted 7:34 am
27 Oct 2006
regarding Illy coffee: Illy is industrialization getting it right. It's a perfectly packaged product that is great and precisely consistent. There's no reason SBUX wouldn't be as good if their customers demanded it, which they obviously don't.
but what SBUX is doing is creating space for the struggle that the new super-specialty cafes are claiming for themselves. Places like Medici, and Gimme! in NY, and Stumptown in Portland, and Victrola in Seattle, and Ritual and Blue Bottle in SF are forging a new, indigenous American haute coffee culture (ugh; what a mouthful -- some folks call it "third wave" coffee, but I dislike that name, so I'm looking for new suggestions--anyone?). And as coffee drinkers, we have the happy duty of drinking the stuff they're producing -- nothing short of the best coffee ever available in all of human history.
(wow...sounds like I need to lay off the stuff...)
my books: The Coffee Book | Window Seat
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gregs Posted 12:34 pm
27 Oct 2006
If people want coffee-scented milkshakes lathered in syrup and whipped cream -- more power to them. I still believe there are millions of people who think they've experienced the pinnacle of what great espresso could be and yet haven't even come close, not making it past a Starbucks "double-tall, four-pump vanilla caramel macchiato" -- and that much is a shame. But there's going to be those who prefer liquid candy anyway. No harm done, and for the rest of us, the chances of finding at least adequate espresso has gone up all over this country. Net result: still pretty good.
As for Illy, they're more like an American garage heavy metal band -- i.e., "We're big in Europe." Illy has set the standard for quality controls. And in Europe (cafés and beans), it shows in the product (e.g., their Espressamente cafés). But in the U.S., I don't care how air tight you make the can, shipping fresh roasted coffee thousands and thousands of miles from Trieste means serious flavor loss. As a result, I've found that Illy in the U.S. is a mere shadow of how it tastes in Europe.
--
^sv
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caniscandida Posted 4:02 pm
27 Oct 2006
For starters, espresso and cappuccino are totally different coffee beverages, taken in totally different contexts, usually (in Italy) at different hours of the day, with different accompanying foods.
The photograph of the full cup of cappuccino, with the design marvelously appearing in the foam, looks like something that would certainly have appealed to the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany.
But, in fact, I consider the addition of milk to coffee a kind of pollution. I have never in my life ever had a "latte," and do not want to have such an experience.
As I believe I wrote once before, I am like Balzac: I take my coffee black and bitter (sans sucre), even as my sinful soul is black and bitter.
But really, we need to establish what are American habits regarding coffee consumption -- well, assuming that many of us readers of Gristmill are American -- , before we can begin to pontificate about what is "good" or "not good" coffee.
One little example: I have no idea whatsoever of how Americans consume espresso in demitasse. And why. And when. I would be most grateful to Tom, if he could explain. We just saw a wonderful little black comedy from 1990, "The Freshman," with Marlon Brando and Matthew Broderick, in which espresso figures.
To Kaela: Thanks for that interesting Madrid narrative. Stunning athletic red-heads clearly get away with a lot in Mediterranean countries. Normally in Spanish, the accent on the word for "Irish" is on the last syllable: ir-lan-DES. If you heard different, that is worth reporting.
Frankly, I would have just ordered a Jerez and a tea, and ignored those complicated coffee concoctions that one does not dare stir with a spoonlet.
Chickens are our cousins!
So are other sensitive animals!
Enough is enough!
No more factory farms!
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BunnyBoy Posted 5:48 am
29 Oct 2006
BTW, to Gregory's list (above) must be added Flying Goat Coffee in Healdsburg. Their bars offer two espresso blends (chosen according to the amount of milk in the drink) and both are ORGANIC and FAIR-TRADE CERTIFIED (this is supposed to be "environmental" commentary after all)!
Also, what's with the Illy infatuation? Especially when there are so many (better) espresso blends being roasted right here in the good ol' USA. And, I agree with gregs: by the time Illy arrives in the U.S. it's stale (despite their high-priced vacuum sealed packaging). And think of all the resources wasted in getting that small can of coffee to us. Third wave coffee is (supposed to be) about local and fresh.
OK, now I'm going surfing!
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Tom Philpott Posted 6:18 am
29 Oct 2006
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