Posted: 23 Feb 2014 - David Lebovitz
Hoo-boy, do I remember the bunch of
flack (to say the least!) for mentioning
way-back-when that the coffee in Paris could use a bit of, um, upgrading. I was
recently reminiscing about that with my friend Pim, who wrote about it
in 2005. People were up in arms, which was a little bizarre since the French
often refer to café coffee as jus
de chausettes, or “sock juice.”
If you’ve been to Paris, you know
that there are lots of cafés but the quality of the coffee isn’t the focus.
However, like all cities, Paris evolves, and in the past few years, a whole battalion
of younger folks, some French, and others from elsewhere, have opened shops
sprouted up far and wide, at a rate that was so fast, that I couldn’t possibly
try them all. (And with all that caffeine surging through my system, I would
have lost 6 1/2 years of sleep.) And other people were doing such a good job of
cataloging them all, that I just sat back and focused on other things.
Being from San Francisco, where
coffee-culture can be obsessive compulsive – if you didn’t study the micron
size of each granule of coffee grinds or have your water analyzed to ensure
your coffee was as clear as a sleek Chemex carafe – you, and your coffee,
simply weren’t up to snuff. I went to espresso school in Italy, where I watched
and learned from the Italian experts how the seemingly simple task of
extracting a perfect espresso actually depended on having mastered a few key
techniques and having the right grinder and espresso machine.
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