I consider it a point of pride to drink it hot.
We’re still thinking about Adrienne Rich.
At least they provided caffeine.
“Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash.” – Leonard Cohen
Coffee Diary – June 26, 2012
Near my sister’s place in Lewes, Delaware is a little breakfast place called Arena’s. They serve breakfast and lunch (the ladies had seafood bisque and I had scrambled eggs and tater tots).
The coffee was serve yourself, but they had several options. A dark to medium roast house blend and its decaffeinated equivalent, a lighter roast from Mexican coffee beans, two options with sugary sounding names, and something called Double Buzz with caffeine added (which sounds like an abomination – I like caffeine, too, but don’t mess with coffee like that).
I went for the lighter roast, which was adequate. I like a place that gives your options of coffee made from different kinds of beans (I love a good grind made from good Sumatran coffee; Sumatran coffee is notably unreliable in quality, but when it’s good, it has a lovely wine-like flavor that I enjoy), but these just weren’t good enough to suggest that the options were anything other than some whitewashing to make average coffee look like it might be good coffee.
Coffee Diary – July 25, 2012
We left for a little trip to Delaware in search of tennis courts, seafood (not for me, I’m vegetarian), and inexpensive dental care. Before heading out, we stopped at Crepes on the Corner.
A ‘coming soon’ sign was pasted on their windows for upwards of eighteen months before they served their first crepe (and their chef immediately injured his hand and they closed again for several days). We had a nutella and strawberry crepe, which was better than usual (their crepes tend to be too thick and bread-y) and the coffee was slightly above average (though below the quality of Capitol Hill’s best coffees). For reading, I just glanced at the Washington Post.
Coffee Diary – July 24, 2012
My first coffee of the day was at a perky pink diner in Georgetown called Serendipity III that we ate at while waiting for the Thai Embassy to re-open. Everything there was enormous and good, but not so good as the price was high. They spelled ‘coffee’ ‘caffe’ and charged three dollars and twenty-five cents and didn’t do refills. But it was good coffee. This was before walking down to Bridge Street Books. They still have tables set outside with piles of inexpensive books – mostly Dover Press editions. When I was living in a bathroom on Prospect Ave and making $1500 a month, I spent virtually all my disposable income on books at that table. Today, for just twenty-five cents more than my coffee, I picked up a copy of Veblen’s economic classic, Theory of the Leisure Class. Painfully relevant economic insights, though his historical insights… meh. Has the book comparing Veblen’s leisure class to Debord’s spectacle been written yet? Someone ought to get to work on that. And if it has been written, someone needs to send me a complimentary copy.
The second cup was at a Barnes and Noble in Alexandria. An espresso, which was disappointing, as most espressos are. I bought a copy of Asimov’s Science Fiction. I was torn between Asimov’s and sister mag Analog, but Asimov’s had a picture of a dinosaur on the cover and a story called Mating Habits of the Late Cretaceous (which is actually a banal and unrealistic bit of marital realism in the style of Carver, except it’s not really very realistic – the marriage I mean, not the thin sci fi veneer around it), so I was suckered into picking that one.
Midweek Staff Meeting – I Told You Coffee Was Magic
Midweek Staff Meeting – Slow & Steady Wins The Tasty Seal
Midweek Staff Meeting – Downtown Tampa
I notice that this list of fast changing neighborhoods includes downtown Tampa and the neighborhood just east of Logan Circle in DC.Eliot & Coffee
Someone recently commented on an older post of mine about T.S. Eliot that they had found the post while searching for information about Eliot’s relationship to coffee.
I didn’t have a good answer for him.
But when I think of Eliot and coffee, I always drift to Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and the man who measures his life in ‘coffee spoons.’
Prufrock always seems to me to partake very strongly of Eliot’s Anglophilia. He is writing in a style to seems to aim for a certain English-ness in its language. But while the English do drink plenty of coffee, we can agree, surely, that tea is a much English drink.
The coffee spoons with which Prufrock measures his life with are an indication of his mundanity and his measured fears. But tea spoons or something associated with tea (sugar spoons?) would be much appropriate to this English style (not many American poems write about a being embarrassed by a footman holding one’s coat; that particular class consciousness sounds more like something from across the Atlantic to me). In that sense, in an English sense, might not coffee spoons stand out?
Maybe not. I’m just guessing. But I’m guessing that is a certain (essential?) American-ness showing through in Eliot, an American-ness we don’t really see again until Four Quartets.
The Best Espresso Ever
While overall engaged in the classic Washington activity of waiting for a phone call telling us our table at Sticky Rice (featuring the most hipsterific wait staff in the DMV) was ready, we walked down H Street towards the Atlas Theater. On the other side of the street, I saw Sova Espresso & Wine, which served, I had read, some of the best coffee in DC.
Sova is actually two places. One is wine bar (which I have not yet been inside) and the other a small, but classic coffeehouse.
The coffeehouse (or should I call it an ‘espresso bar?’) has only a few seats, but is appropriately cluttered with weeklies and flyers and pamphlets for protest marches and yoga classes. A single man behind the counter carefully assembled each order (which waiting in a for longer than one might normally expect, considering how few people were ahead of me).
I ordered an espresso.
Ordering an espresso is an exercise in unfounded faith. Because, let’s be honest, 99.9% of all espresso are terrible. The harsh flavor of burnt, bitter coffee completely drowns all the possible flavors of the coffee bean.
But this was different.
It was the best espresso ever.
It didn’t taste burnt or bitter. The aromatic oils of the coffee were present and the overall flavor had the notes of full bodied red wine.
I told the barista, “That was the best espresso I have ever had.”
The B Spot Jazz Trio; Or, Is Cornel West Drunk?
Last Saturday night, my better half I ambled over to the B-Spot, a teahouse on the second story a building on Pennsylvania, just above a pizza-by-the-slice shop.
I haven’t been there in a while, but I keep on meaning to go for their regular, Saturday night jazz sets, usually featuring the B Spot Trio, the teahouse’s aptly named house band.
The place serves quality tea (the owner takes his tea very seriously), is swankily decorated with modern looking furniture and paintings by local artists (the place also does brisk business in framing, which seems odd, but what the heck).
So I convinced her to come with me and listen to some tunes and drink some tea.
The Trio plays some good music and the crowd skews older – forties and up. With the more mature audience and the lack of alcohol, the vibe really was one of the coffeehouses I remember from my adolescence and early twenties, back when the main draw was not Starbucks latest attempt to serve a sixteen ounce cup of frothy milk, cut with a little coffee, nor even a place to bring one’s laptop, but rather music, poetry, and conversation.
And while my camera took a fuzzy picture, in the corner, next to the window, is a painting that looks for all the world like someone painted a portrait of Cornel West as if the philosopher was just coming off a two day bender and wearing a wife beater and drinking a warm bottle of beer.
the coffee philosopher 