Archive for May, 2009
Back to Kitanda for Brazilian Espresso
D'arte at Kitanda, originally uploaded by andai. Last December, I wrote a post about my first visit to Kitanda, the Brazilian Cafe and bakery down in the Bellevue/Redmond area. I had initially noticed them when I was driving back to work after lunch and since I am always on the lookout for new places to try. I was pretty excited to try out their Brazilian espresso as was advertised on their huge sign. This was certainly welcome too since the main choices for espresso you have in that area are Starbucks and Jitters Coffee. It was shortly after that that my work required me to commute to Kent so I was absent from the Redmond area for a while. Fast forward to a few months later, I was back in the area, working on a new project. On this particular day I just had this craving for a baked good from the Brazilian bakery which of course meant that I was going to have to order another espresso drink. Besides the baked goodies, I really wanted to see if they had improved, not in customer service for which they [...]
The Back Porch Café
Our guest blogger Tina is German but lives and works in New Zealand. She enjoys the coffee culture in New Zealand and is sending posts of her espresso sojourn. Coming from a country where it is common to have ‘coffee and cake’ at around 4pm in the afternoon, I still haven’t managed to adjust to the fact that most cafés down here close just around that time, if not earlier. I suppose Kiwis prefer an early Saturday morning coffee break so they can spend the rest of the day surfing, hiking, kayaking, paragliding, fishing or sailing. Since my perfect Sunday involves sleeping in, having a late breakfast, browsing through a book or magazine for a while, taking a long shower and then heading to town to stroll around the little shops, by the time I enter one of the cafés, most of the other people have already left. The same happened on Saturday afternoon a couple of weeks back, when I walked into The Back Porch Café, a neat little place between a strip of shops on the road towards Mt Maunganui. I [...]
Updated: Maximilien at the Market (with Stella)
In my previous blog posting, Maximilien at the Market I talked about the Mother's day brunch celebration we had at Maximilien, the French restaurant at Seattle's Pike Place Market. When I took a look at the menu, I noticed that they offered coffee from both Caffè D'arte and Stella Coffee. These two are actually really good Italian style coffee roasters here in Seattle and so it was a no brainer that I would find myself ordering an espresso right off the bat. The only problem here though was the waiter. He waiter just did not seem to know much about the coffee they were serving even though is was right there on the menu. The Caffè D'arte was for espresso drinks, while Stella Coffee was the choice for drip coffee. On talking to the waiter, I quickly found he didn't really know what coffee was being served so he went to the back to ask. He finally came back from the kitchen, triumphant told me that all they served was Caffè D'arte.... none of that Stella Coffee stuff. Well fair enough I thought... even [...]
Maximilien at the Market
Each year, I spend Mother's Day brunch with my relatives here in Seattle and since they love to go out to nice restaurants, we tend to try out a different place each time. This year's choice for brunch was Maximilien, the French restaurant at the Pike Place Market. If you know where the famous 'flying fish' stall at Pike Place Market is, you want to take the little hallway to your left. Just be sure to be ready to duck, just in case some butterfingered tourist misses the catch and you get smacked by one of the fish. Sometimes the fish guys will let the customer catch the fish. Not much to say about the food that they served, not that it wasn't good or anything like that, but only because we are here to talk about espresso and not French cuisine! So I ordered a latte. The lattes come in little 8 oz cups which is just fine by me. As I was trying to find out more about their coffee, the waiter was not as knowledgeable about the coffee as I thought he would be.... But that was ok, because on the menu, the [...]
Updated: Java Java and Ikea Coffee
So after the whole deal with Java Java and Ikea Coffee I decided to revisit each once again and then make my final conclusion on whether Ikea would be a source of espresso for me. So the first thing I did this past week, was to give the Bryggkaffe Mellanrost or as I also like to call it, Ikea Coffee another chance. This time I ground the coffee even finer, put it in my Krupp espresso maker and I actually made a latte with it. OK now before you get on me and my Krupp espresso please realize I got it 10 years ago when I didn't know much about making lattes, and it sat in its box for almost 2 years before I finally busted it out. I will probably get a new one next year for reasons I don't want to explain at the moment... but I digress... So I steamed the milk and all that, added sugar to my taste... and found out that the latte really wasn't to my taste. I then took a step further and blended my fine coffee beans with some other coffee beans that I have and that didn't work either. I found that the flavor of [...]
I Say Good Espresso! You Say Bad Espresso!
Dixie aka Generic Coffee Cup, originally uploaded by andai. Eventually when you publicly state an opinion about something, even something like coffee, you will get those whose opinions are in strong opposition to yours and some of these folks will certainly let you know this. I find this inevitably happens when you start to share your preference for one particular coffee roast over another, one coffeehouse over another or even one locale over another and state that opinion with certainty. Although I had actually started on this post a while back, what actually inspired me to flesh it out was a post I did a couple of weeks ago where I talked about how Volunteer Park Café (and Marketplace) had decided to replace the Seattle based roaster, Café Vita with Stumptown, the roaster originally from Portland for all their roasted coffee beans needs. The two comments that followed were rather interesting. One was in support to my notion that I vaguely remember the Café Vita drinks I enjoyed there as [...]
Quest for the Perfect Coffee in Paradise
This, my first official post on GFBO was really inspired by the need to leave behind the daily stresses e.g. computers, traffic, etc., to seek solace in what can only be described as the exquisitely lush beauty of this country. Over the past weekend, I embarked on a road trip with my girls from Kigali to Gisenyi. Now the city of Gisenyi is one of Rwanda’s most popular tourist destinations due to the fact that it’s situated on Lake Kivu. This trip takes about five and a half hours, with a couple of stops along the way. The road is rather awesome for the three hours from Kigali to Ruhengeri but then gets a little bit bumpy for reminder of the journey. Our trip was also a bit of an adventure since we decided to eschew private comfort and take public transportation instead. The bus, rather comfortable despite the lack of leg room was driven by a shifty driver who seemed to think it was perfectly fine to careen at full speed around the many treacherous curves winding up the hills. We arrived in Gisenyi at [...]
From The Land of a Thousand Hills
My name is Negrita and I will be contributing to the Grounds for Burnt Offerings blog from Rwanda, where I live, I love, I laugh, I write. I also indulge in some serious coffee consumption. Rwanda, also known as the ‘Land of a Thousand Hills’, is home to arguably the best coffee in the world. Rwanda provides an ideal climate for coffee cultivation, with its high altitudes, relatively temperate climate, and volcanic soils. The Arabica coffee grown here is primarily Bourbon and promotion of the coffee industry is a recent phenomenon, as the country has been in the process of rehabilitation and rebuilding since the 1994 Genocide. Although Rwanda boasts great coffee, the coffee culture in Rwanda is still in its early stages, with most of the population being tea drinkers, culturally and habitually. But over the last few years, as the country opens up to residents from all over the world, as it joins the East African Community and as it generally becomes more dynamic, a coffee culture has emerged that [...]
Java Java and Ikea Coffee
Java Java, originally uploaded by andai. I like going to Ikea to buy cheap 'competitively priced' stuff and checking out Swedish 'cuisine' at their cafe. After check-out, I would head out the the little cafeteria stand right by the exit for a 12 oz latte for the road. This latte costs $1.00, a real bargain... I mean at $1.00 who can resist? The only other place that I know that sells $1.00 lattes is Costco. However, over that past couple of years, though I do go to Ikea to buy stuff, I find that I am actually able to resist their lattes. Why? Well it is sort of a good news, bad news explanation. The good news is that at $1.00, this is a darn pretty good deal. The bad news is, the lattes are really not that great. The good news is that I don't go to Ikea that often to really miss out. The bad news is that even when I do go to Ikea, even at the $1.00 price point, I am not eager to buy the latte and when I break down and do so, I feel like I wasted the $1.00. The good news though is that there are lots of [...]