Hard News: Food Show 08
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Has anybody in London tried the cafe at Scooterworks in SE 1? http://www.scooterworks-uk.com/#
This is managed by a friend of mine Craig, and while I have never been there (I left the UK before it opened), I used to flat with the guy in Peckham and he made a mean coffee. He also imports coffee machines from Italy, the original type with handles, not buttons, as operated at DKD all those years back.I'll check it out this week sometime, it would be nice to have good coffee around the Waterloo area
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... no discussion about coffee would be complete without mentioning the Neapolitan tradition of the "caffè pagato", the paid-for coffee...
Sounds very civilised and civilising. But Foreign-Word-Association-Futbol reminded me of the Chilean "cafe con piernas" - national coffee shop chains where the customers' drooling is not in anticipation of a fine brew, and even a homesick Kiwi would hesitate before asking for a 'flat white'...
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Scroobius Pip needs to add a new lyric:
"Coffee, just a drink" -
Sacred in Carnaby St area
Until recently I worked for a big-brand NZ company who are doing well for themselves in the UK and had an office at the base of Carnaby St. Of the few trips I made to that office, I would ALWAYS head to Sacred as soon as I arrived - leading to much ribbing from a primarily-English office of "flown for 28hours to get here and the first thing you do is go to a NZ cafe!" Until I bought them a flat white - that shut them up...
IIRC, the London cafe awards from last year had something like three NZ cafes in the five finalists?
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B Jones:
I've yet to find a hot chocolate anywhere that's as good as the stuff I make at home. I got the recipe years ago from the Listener - you melt a slab of dark chocolate with 300ml of cream in a pot over hot water, add a little vanilla essence (or baileys, or whisky, or chilli or whatever you like most with your chocolate), let it cool to room temperature and beat it until holds its shape. You add a spoonful to a cup of hot milk for hot choc without any grainy rubbish at the bottom. This would keep in the fridge for months, but it gets consumed pretty quickly.
That's not hot chocolate - that's a basic chocolate icing, which you're then diluting with milk!
The Listener did have a nice recipe for a Spanish hot chocolate: 50g of 55% bittersweet (10 squares) slowly melted into a cup of milk, with a Tbsp of sugar and a cinnamon stick; then once its all melted, you whisk in a cup of strong black coffee and a dash of brandy. Serve over orange peel. Alternatively, there's the recipe I grabbed over the net for Parisian: 1 cup milk, 1/3 cup cream, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/2 block 55% bittersweet, slowly melt it together. It's the Turkish coffee of hot chocolates, like taking molten dark chocolate and then diluting it a bit so its drinkable. use very small cups...
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IIRC, the London cafe awards from last year had something like three NZ cafes in the five finalists?
Now there's my idea of an export industry - expertise.
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I don't remember the coffee at Governors much, except that it was much better than the coffee in the Union*. What I remember about Governors was the Hot Apple and Walnut Cake. I had mine with yoghurt, absolute magic.
The best thing about Governors were the pancakes...so crammed with berries...so soft and fluffy...so delicious. I think that was the other reason why the whole staff at Governor's remembered me, I always ordered the same thing every time- pancakes and a hot chocolate. Wonderful.
I miss Governors.
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I'm 5+ pages too late, but am wading in to defend Whangarei and the North in general. A Whangarei bar/cafe named Barfly was serving great Allpress coffee in about 1999. And in about 1998, I had amazing coffee in the tiny town of Rawene on the Hokianga.
Viva la Taniwha!
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Mark, was that the place in Rawene built over the water?
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Sue,
in ChCh
Amazingly they make really good coffee's at the millenium hotel
I was responsible for getting some people at a workshop very specific coffeestriple shot with soy over ice to be specific
and they got it purfectC4 does great breakfast
"oh and Espressoholic 2000. The hot chocolate is good, but is the ONLY thing it does well. "
I'll disagree on that one their version of a hot chocolate is milk , milk and again the dreaded cadburys cafe hot chocolate mix. -
Gareth this link will warm your heart(re Sacred)
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Ah, great stuff Ben - I see they came runner up in that best coffee award I mentioned; good on them...
Will revisit in January. -
Oh, and just in case you thought going to Gloria Jean's for your chain coffee was cool, it ain't.
I sincerely hope that no-one here thinks that Gloria Jean's is cool, politics or otherwise. Same goes for Esquires, Starbucks any any other paint-by-numbers chain.
I may not be a coffee snob, but I quite proudly say that I am a cafe snob. Starbucks could serve the best coffee in the world, and I still wouldn't drink it: it feels like sitting in a PowerPoint presentation, not a cafe. In a proper cafe, I feel that a bunch of people got together and said "Hey, let's open a cafe! Yeah, we could get Dave's muffin recipe! And I know a guy who does some really great design!". In a chain store, I feel that a Strategic Location Committee analysed some demographic trends and put a cross on a map.
And for Wellington hot choc lovers, here's a little survey I did a while back.
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Starbucks could serve the best coffee in the world, and I still wouldn't drink it: it feels like sitting in a PowerPoint presentation, not a cafe.
Tom: Perfect analogy.
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Indeed.
And nowhere is the designed-by-committee PowerPointitude of Starbucks more obvious than in the miserable copywritten words printed all over the tables and the mass-produced "artworks" on the walls. These phrases and stories are meant to bring to mind the cosmopolitan culture you associate with a real cafe, which means they've been designed with all the necessary words to tick specific "evocative" boxes on a focus group questionnaire somewhere. In a word: ick.
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it feels like sitting in a PowerPoint presentation
Love.
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Karen, I visited Scooterworks last night (on the way to watch a rescreening of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly at the BFI) and it did seem pretty cool. The interior is a weird mixture of workshop/cafe/garage/garden but it all works well enough and the coffee was pretty good, what I didn't spill on myself as I was power-walking to the cinema. Kind of cool to see the barrista covered in paint speckled work clothes too
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ya know, PA was the HoS blog of the week again. Not because of any political commentary, but because of Russell's comments about coffee. Congrats.
(from Che)...i think 'snobbery' is prefering something because you think it's better than other alternatives.
I'd say 'snobbery' is when a group of people have a clear idea of what they like of a particular thing, and think less of people who don't agree with their 'high quality' tastes (and possibly even of people who just don't care that much about the issue).
Anyway, I was reading a forum where some nerds were discussing US politics, and it transpires that apparently Obama supporters prefer Starbucks! This helps mark him out as an elitist (or so argued the wingnut nerd.) So I guess Russell will be disappointed.
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it transpires that apparently Obama supporters prefer Starbucks! [snip] So I guess Russell will be disappointed.
Well a local cafe cannot possibly win a nationwide poll ...
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it transpires that apparently Obama supporters prefer Starbucks! [snip] So I guess Russell will be disappointed.
Well a local cafe cannot possibly win a nationwide poll ...
America runs on Dunkin', dontcha know...
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