New York
Having recently returned from New York I thought it might be a nice idea to write a few words about the coffee ‘scene’ there. Well, that’s as much as I had written when I started to write this article several weeks ago. The trip is now only recent if we’re speaking in terms of seasons or longer. It’s been so long, Dave has even stopped asking me how it’s coming along. He hasn’t stopped writing snarky remarks about me on boards.ie as one of my colleagues pointed out to me the other day.
The Other Black Stuff
Sitting in a courtyard in Covent Garden, drinking a cappuccino, this is where coffee came to life for me. I had drunk coffee before (mostly instant) but this was a watershed coffee, ordered in a whimsy. It made me aware that there was more to coffee than I had previously realised – warm, sweet, and satisfying. The problem now is that being ten or more years further along this coffee journey; I cannot remember if this coffee was any good. I suspect modern me would probably never have sat down in the place in the first instance. Instead I would have surreptitiously identified a glaring flaw with some element of the coffee preparation technique and exited stage-left without delay. That or I would have sat down, glanced at a neighbouring table, identifying “soap bubble” foam on top of a latté and resigned myself to having a tea or a soft-drink. If past me had not ordered that cappuccino though, modern me might not exist. The space-time continuum is in jeopardy.