Hard News: Food Show 08
245 Responses
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But it is probably true to say that the cafe thing really took off from about 1991.
In early-mid '92, here in Dunedin, I scored a job at The Percolator, the first place in town with - gasp! - an espresso machine. The Percolator was the first "proper" cafe in town, beforehand, it was only tea shops.
It was a hell of a novelty, it must be said. Anyway, the Perc very quickly filled a big demand for good coffee and it flourished. These days, there must be about 40 cafes withen a 2km radius of the Octagon.
(Incidentally, The Perc was set up by one David Parker, his wife and sister-in-law).To suggest that Starbucks were pioneers in bringing coffee to NZ is just ludicrous. Chez Elco in Nelson was making espressos back in the '60s, for God's sake.
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I had a win last week - after years of Mrs Llew insisting on buying Extra Light olive oil, and refusing to take my word that she should be buying extra virgin, the DomPost informed her that the "light" has nothing to do with fat content, and all to do with colour & taste. Yay!
Yes, that's true - the purpose of the light (colourless) stuff is for frying etc (higher smoking temp) or can be used in baking that requires oil (safflower is better) as it has no flavour. The extra virgin green should be used for salad dressings, and is the oil you add when making stuff like hummous or mayonnaise. You can heat the extra virgin, it's just not good for frying.
Re: coffee in Vancouver in particular in North America in general: yes, it's sadly true that coffee is largely undrinkable in Vancouver. In the 70s and 80s there were great coffee places - one called The Classical Joint that had been popular since the 50s and was still filled with goateed beatniks in berets, spouting poetry and playing chess - and older places like Max's Deli that have been going since the 30s or 40s. The Mozart Cafe (before Robson Street became Vancouver's Rodeo Drive) served excellent Austrian coffee and truly fabulous food, and their famous Cafe Vienna - strong coffee/hot chocolate hybrid topped with whipped cream and shaved chocolate.
Almost all of Vancouver's great coffee places were driven out of business by Starbucks, so weirdly dominant there, there is literally one on every corner in some neighbourhoods. They sold coffee cheaper and traded longer hours, a combo that seemed to destroy any other coffee place's business. When I go home I'm horrified to find coffee culture is extinct in my hometown - there are a few secret places trading, almost like an underground coffee scene, but good coffee is strangely extinct. Remember this is a place that valued coffee so much that high schools (mine anyway) had a coffee room with espresso machine and big sofas and armchairs for us to socialise, drink coffee and play the jukebox while we studied.
Coffee all across North America used to be very good, strong filter coffee. The rule all across North America - Canada, USA & Mexico - is the first cup you buy, all refills are free. It's the Bottomless Cup of Coffee. Until the late 1970s when coffee was cheap the coffee was served strong - the price shot up (partly due to US military incursions in South America, if I remember correctly) and suddenly filter coffee became very weak and vile.
Remember it was American servicemen who brought coffee culture to NZ in the first place - though it didn't seem to catch on much. When I first came here in the late 1980s there was little available but instant and the "real" coffee made in restaurants was often kept on a rolling boil and formed not so much a drink as a grey colloidal system of burnt coffee particles. And food was really, really vile in cafes - there was scone-base "pizza" - tinned spagetti with white sugar sprinkled over. There was one kind of cheese for all time - recipes read "cheese" as they knew there was only one kind in the whole country. A person could go mad shopping for then exotic ingredients like fresh herbs or any other cheese besides "cheese". Or olive oil or eggplant or artichokes. You couldn't buy yoghurt, let alone full fat unsweetened Greek yoghurt. You couldn't even buy fresh ginger. Restaurants served fuit that came out of tins. It was sad.
Mind you, in defence of traditional English cooking, my mother in law made the most amazing pot roast with a fresh (from her garden) thyme stuffing, she knew all the tricks about roasting potatoes (par boil, dredge with flour and salt while still hot, let dry completely, plunge into red hot oil and roast quickly) she could make the best gravy on earth - I don't usually like gravy, but one needed it to go with her astonishing yorkshire puddings - and she was famous, very famous for her baking. She made fried scones which were fantastic, and very good with homemade jam (my contribution) and cream. She used to make more than a dozen (__literally__) desserts for Christmas dinner if you included all the gingerbread, shortbread etc.
But I must say I wouldn't want to eat that kind of food every day, and I am soooo lucky I didn't grow up eating that stuff. My NZer husband found it strange that I should have grown up eating fresh pineapple, coconut, mangoes and chewing fresh sugar cane in the Pacific Northwest, while he ate weird grey cubed fruit out of a tin down here in the South Pacific.
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The Percolator was the first "proper" cafe in town, beforehand, it was only tea shops.
Not so! What about Governors.
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If it is any help to the nostalgics here, I have just come across an article in the 29th October 1990 edition of the Listener entitled The Shock of the Brew:
"How many cups of coffee do you drink a day? A modest amount of caffeine can keep you feeling full of beans. But, despite recent reports that coffee is safe, excessive quanties of this drug can be extremely harmful, both physically and mentally."
Clearly, by 1990 coffee had become a problem. Incidentally, the article was written by Pamela Stirling.
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I went to Thailand in 2006, and what stuck me was that you actually get real coffee - so I didn't have to settle the ubiquitous Nescafé rubbish. It was a real change when I was there last, in 2001.
Reminds me, I need to roast another kilo or so of coffee beans this weekend. It's a pungent operation, but well worth it.
As for Starbucks closing down in Aussie, is it some kind of karma for the fact that they have four SBs in Guantanamo Bay ?
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Just made a coffee. I could see it was coming out beautifully straight away by the blobbing and tiger-striping. I'm now back to wondering why 90% of cafes can't make a cup as good as some munter like me can make at home ...
Sorry, this is from a different machine to the manual one you linked to in your main piece? By the way, what's the name of the manual contraption, it greatly appeals!
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Just made a coffee. I could see it was coming out beautifully straight away by the blobbing and tiger-striping. I'm now back to wondering why 90% of cafes can't make a cup as good as some munter like me can make at home ...
Doh!
Sorry, this is from a different machine to the manual one you linked to in your main piece? By the way, what's the name of the manual contraption, it greatly appeals!
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Indeed they wouldn't. Particularly not the Starbucks on Parnell Road, sandwiched between about four spectacularly good cafes.
One of which, based on my one and only visit, seems to be hiring staff who are too socially inept to find work in high end fashion retail or silver service restaurants. While there are real improvements on that score, I wonder how many cafes and restaurants would still be in business today if they got the idea of service.
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Three things:
one of the weird wee family hierlooms I have is a coffee-grinder brought out from the Orkneys...we had a coffee-percolator machine when I was a child but - grinder & machine- all was made redundant when we could no longer get coffee beans...that tradition has been around ever since Pakeha arrived.PaulManders - o thanks! Now everyone knows about Havoc pork, we & mine will no longer be able to get it. Psssst! Dont mention the Waimate capons!!!!
Seriously: animals can be farmed in happy & healthy living conditions, and killed humanely (NOT in fukkin' abbattoirs.) Their meat then - tastes really good-
Starbucks - like that unfortunate English fishnchip chain (the *truly worst* fishnchips I've ever tasted in my life were in England) that thought it could over-ride local tastes, provender & expertise, Starbucks didnt research its market. Both have done, are doing, commercial oblivion-
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How many cups of coffee do you drink a day?
Our doctor told my mum she could have up to five coffees a day. I think she understood that she needed to have five coffees a day, so if she hasn't reached the quota by evening she'll make herself a double, bless her.
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Paul, ducking in here - a Presso - hugely reccommended - always carry one in my van
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One of which, based on my one and only visit, seems to be hiring staff who are too socially inept to find work in high end fashion retail or silver service restaurants. While there are real improvements on that score, I wonder how many cafes and restaurants would still be in business today if they got the idea of service.
Ouch. Perhaps I might have been taking Starbucks as an excessively low baseline for comparison. At least, several places manifestly better than Starbucks as far as I have been able to gauge over the last four years. I presume this wasn't Dunk you're talking about?
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Apropos of making coffee at home, here's Bond making M an espresso in "Live and Let Die".
For the fans at home, that's a La Pavoni Europiccola. Get one of those and all the foxy Italian spies for fall you, by all accounts.
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giovanni tiso - this isn't aimed at you, I hope you don't mind!
Danielle, not the right forum I know, but everyone seems desperate to pretend fascism isn't on the march in Italy in the hope it will go away.
I'm not half as obnoxious as the Fascist goons masquerading as Italian Police who ran amok at the G8 summit in Genoa - If you haven't already, read this story: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/17/italy.g8
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jul/15/italy.g81Undoubtably, Rome's mayor (arrested in 1981 for beating up a student with four other neo-fascists wielding baseball bats and welcomed to office by crowds chanting "Duce, Duce") would approve.
Then there is the appalling, fascist motivated racism against the Gypsy population in Italy, with mobs (including, again, police) burning down Roma camps in Naples. Or people blithly standing by as some Roma girls drowned on a Naples beach, or not prosecuting fishermen who beat with sticks survivors from a boatload of illegal immigrants attempting to reach Italy from North Africa, leaving them instead to drown.
The Economist Intelligence Unit already characterises Italy as having a "flawed" democracy. Silvio Berlusconi (""Fascism in Italy was never a criminal doctrine...") and the rest of his right wing mobsters are transforming Italy into a neo-fascist state that is democratic in name only. As I said, it will be interesting to see how long the rest of EU can continue to ignore the elephant in the room...
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Why pay 50 pounds for a bad-tasting coffee in London? The average price is two quid.
Civet paste is obtained from squeezing or scraping the anal glands of the IUCN Red Listed (critically endangered) African civet cat, the Indian civet, the Lesser Indian civet and other civet species.
Back to the Food Show, please!!
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In Auckland, DKD opened in 1985, I think. There were a few other places serving espresso (what was the health-food plae in Lorne St?), but it's generally agreed that you can trace the Auckland cafe culture from there.
Dominos, if its the one I think you mean. They used to do great vegetarian lasagnes, back in the days when I was experimenting with vegetarianism (well, experimenting with vegetarian women would probably be more accurate).
When I first moved to Auckland in '85, there was a place in one of the arcades just down from The Corner. I'd heard of this expresso thing and thought I'd try it out. Got served it in this little bloody thing the size of a film cannister, 'what a bloody rip off' I thought and threw it back.
Spent the rest of the morning bouncing off the walls.
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Now that's what you'd call a crappachino
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(Sorry - referring to the civet coffee with my last comment!)
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giovanni tiso - this isn't aimed at you, I hope you don't mind!
Danielle, not the right forum I know, but everyone seems desperate to pretend fascism isn't on the march in Italy in the hope it will go away.
I'm as dismayed and upset about the state of the Italian nation as the next fellow, possibly more, but I wouldn't bandy around the F word without knowing what the hell I was talking about.
Berlusconi is many bad things, and a friend of several fascists past and present, to be sure, not to mention several mafiosi. But to characterise him as a fascist or is regime as fasicsm is lazy and unhelpful. And it also implies a very troubling exoneration of (if not downright nostalgia for) the christian democrat going ons that have intervened - in that regard I'm honestly not sure that we're worse off than we were in the Seventies, when bombs exploded on trains and in crowded squares and anarchist railwaymen launched themselves with prodigious vigour outside of police station windows.
Back to the food conversation now, nothing to see here.
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a Presso
Thanks Islander - I realised I'd misread the earlier piece, I think I'd read this as espresso and a reference to its product, not its personality.
I'll track one down, it seems just the answer I'm in need of.
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What Giovanni said.
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The Percolator was the first "proper" cafe in town, beforehand, it was only tea shops.
Not so! What about Governors.
Governors did coffee, but only those old-fashioned, heated, big glass pots of swill. It didn't have an espresso machine, The Perc was the first to have one.
Also, Gov's merely did cups of warmed-up brown liquid. The Perc did an extensive range of coffees. Don't get me wrong, I liked Gov's, but as I said The Perc was the first to have an espresso machine and all that that entails. -
A, but you have sneaked a definition of 'proper cafe' in now, as a cafe that has an espresso machine. But with that definition in mind, then sure.
I went to Gov's for the icecream sundaes, anyway. And the hot chocolate.
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__Just made a coffee. I could see it was coming out beautifully straight away by the blobbing and tiger-striping. I'm now back to wondering why 90% of cafes can't make a cup as good as some munter like me can make at home ...__
Doh!
Sorry, this is from a different machine to the manual one you linked to in your main piece? By the way, what's the name of the manual contraption, it greatly appeals!
It's a Vibiemme Domobar espresso machine, which came via our relationship with Karajoz, and the Great Blend in particular. It's the all-stainless steel one, and I can't say i'd have spent $3000 on a coffee machine myself, but by golly I love having it.
The manual one is the Presso. Espresso Engineers should be able to sell you one. For that matter, they should be able to advertise one ...
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Me too. That was after trying Coffee Connoisseurs, where I was made to wait ages for a very expensive and completely hopeless long black.
Agreed, much coffee is Singapore is shocking, even at those little cafes just off Chinatown which try to be European. The best European styled coffee I've found there is in a bar called The Imperial, also in Chinatown. Then again Singapore is all about franchise-everything. Good espresso coffee demands soul and it's something that has been franchised out of the island.
But for all that, if you want Asian coffee, Little India has dozens of places serving fluffy Kopi Taurik (pulled coffee) or there are plentiful Malay or Indonesian places serving Kopi Jawa which is hot and sticky and quite wonderful. When in Rome....
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