Sunday, June 29, 2003


nyc scaa membership event day 2: fancy food

arose bright and cheery and raced off to the javits center to meet up with the scaa consumer members for day 2, our tour of the fancy food show. don schoenholdt of gillies laughed and laughed when i naively described my plans for this day to him last week. and now i know why.

you cannot do fancy food in one day, even just the coffee portion. the fancy food show is so tremendously huge, you need 2 days. the 6 people who came and went could not possibly visit and taste the coffee at every exhibitor there. the place is a sea of coffee; and ocean of food.

when the tide moved, you were deluged with the flow of people, and we at several point resorted to using cell phones to try to find each other; you could become lost in a moment. in fact, we never did find steve bookman again.

i believe he was kidnapped by the beautiful women in the foods of switzerland section, although perhaps he is actually being held by that gorgeous turkish woman who gave him a bag for his loot. . .my cell phone battery died eventually, and i may have missed the ransom call.

those captors holding steve bookman please email me and i will redeem him. . .

since alas maddy page couldn't make it, we did enjoy the company of steve schulman and periodically jeff of kudo beans; richard freilich; and owen egan of montreal and his liz and william.

of all the coffee exhibitors there, the one i most enjoyed meeting was the rep from palombini espresso. this all-arabica italian line is just now launching itself in the u.s.a., starting with better restaurants.

frederic courteau is just the kind of passionate espresso advocate i'm used to meeting. he's also apparently working on a line of lovely collectible espresso cups.

an idealist to the core, however, he is compromising with the reality of the restaurant market by offering pods. "america will never have a barista culture, unfortunately," he reluctantly confessed. well, frederic, i know some people who are at work trying to change that. please help us!

i sampled more espressos than i perhaps knew existed: 3 from brazil; 4 or 5 from italy, including danesi; probably 8 american shops from around the country, including places like scaa members crimson cup, which heralded itself as coffee for independent thinkers.

i also had a unique experience at allann bros. coffee, whose teasingly combative owner told me he didn't care what i thought of his coffee and then dared me to cup it. so i did. i ground some, borrowed his battered silver hawaiian cupping spoon, and went through the whole procedure.

actually, i made him take a photograph of me with the spoon. you know i love the spoons pros cup with. . .he'd better keep his promise and email me the pic. hell hath no fury like a woman scorned!

i also had an enlightening chat with a technician from IPM about the expobar series. he described a problem owners sometimes have with the 3-way solenoid valve, which can only be prevented by scrupulous back-flushing after every espresso session.

and then he kindly gave me a kilo of gavina old havana espresso.

throughout the show steve schulman was incredible company, as in fact was the constantly drifting mix of scaa consumer members. it was an exhausting fun time.

finally, i got to meet some local coffee people from new york: our local illy rep; the white house coffee people; hena coffee; and of course i bumped into the delightful oren bloostein of oren's daily roast. . . .

but our event is not over! all scaa consumer members still have yet to convene at the colombian coffee federation tomorrow evening at 6pm for the cocktail party!

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