Blue Bottle Coffee Co.

If I ever move away from Northern California, the single thing I will miss the most is quick and easy access to the Funky. Growing up, it didn’t take me very long to realize that my family used that word more liberally than the rest of the block. One or two raised eyebrows of other parents as the word belted out from my sister or I and a few brief looks of confused, semi-shock from school friends at the sound of it breaking from my Dad, and I subtly realized that this bit of vocabulary leaned toward abnormal.

To us, funky was beyond “different”—it meant eclectic, fascinatingly obscure, admirable. If something easily discounted as distasteful was instead deemed funky by one of us, the other three automatically gave it a greater sense of worth and dutifully scrutinized it in defense or debate of its so-called funkiness. Our family spent much time discovering many of the communities around the Bay together. From Mendocino to Monterey, we day-tripped to meet vendors of little shops selling feathers and sea shells, architectural books, antique furnishings, artisan foods, hand-dyed ribbons, one-of-a-kind treasures—and, as one merchant to this day describes her offerings, a “mysterious accumulation of the weird and wonderful.”

Now that the rest of my family has moved to SoCal, I’ve taken it upon myself to keep up the tradition of weekend wandering—partially out of habit, and partially because it’s great fun to dangle some tidbit story in front of them about an interesting new spot, when all they have in return is a recent article ranking Kentucky Fried as the #1 spot to eat chicken in Orange County. So, eat up you three…

When it comes to coffee, what can get more funky than a store front on the back alley of Hayes Street in SF? Roll-up the metal garage door and step up to Blue Bottle’s coffee bar. It may block your way to work, if you’ve come to build furniture in the woodshop filling the rest of the space, but for the rest of us, it’s artisan micro-roasting at it’s finest, not to mention the best latté in San Francisco (complete with steamed milk leaf décor).

Below, an excerpt from www.bluebottlecoffee.net:

The Story of Blue Bottle Coffee Company
In the late 1600s, the Turkish army swept across much of Eastern and Central Europe, arriving at Vienna in 1683. Besieged and desperate, the Viennese needed an emissary who could pass through Turkish lines to get a message to the nearby Polish troops. Franz George Kolshitsky, who spoke Turkish and Arabic, took on the assignment disguised in a Turkish uniform. After many perilous close calls, Kolshitsky completed his valiant deed, returning to give the Viennese the news of the Poles' imminent rescue of their city. On September 13, the Turks were repelled from Vienna, leaving everything they brought: camels, tents, honey, and strange bags of beans which were thought to be camel feed. Kolshitsky, having lived in the Arab world for several years, knew these were bags of coffee. Using the money bestowed on him by the mayor of Vienna for his heroic deed, Kolshitsky bought the Turks' coffee, opened Central Europe's first coffee house (The Blue Bottle), and brought coffee to a grateful Vienna.

319 years later, in Oakland, California, a slightly disaffected freelance musician and coffee lunatic, weary of the grande eggnog latte, and the double skim pumpkin-pie macchiato, decides to open a roaster for people who are clamoring for the actual taste of freshly roasted coffee. Using a miniscule six-pound batch roaster, he makes an historic vow: "I will only sell coffee less than 48 hours out of the roaster to my customers, so they may enjoy coffee at its peak of flavor. I will only use the finest organic, and pesticide-free, shade-grown beans. If they can't come to me, I will drive to their house to give them the freshest coffee they have ever tasted." In honor of Kolshitsky's heroics, he names his business The Blue Bottle Coffee Company, and begins another chapter in the history of superlative coffee.

(yeah, that's funky).

Vintage Food Posters

Although many friends and family think my world revolves around food, I'm happy to report that (despite the blog) my interests are really quite varied. Still, it's always grand when you stumble onto something that involves many of your interests all at once, and this website fits the description for me--graphic design, food, vintage pieces...Someone recently shared it with me, and for those who also find vintage travel/industry-specific posters interesting, I thought I'd pass it along to you as well: www.internationalposter.com

Goin' to Lucques

Darting through the hustling Kitchen, my sight sometimes clears from the battalion of vague white coats that line the counters and stove tops. I cease to be distracted by a flashing knife, instead seeing the scarred hand that holds it. That hand neighbors another pair of hands which neighbor another cook and then another. My mind wanders from my own mission and instead I think of each chef leading a separate life, aspiring to a different dream. What path brought them here? Which ones wish to stay? What kind of kitchen do the others hope to lead one day?

And then someone does leave. They open their own place or partner with another to live out their dream. They do well or they do okay and their restaurant is different than you expected, or maybe it’s exactly as you expected. They take what they’ve gleaned from other kitchens and correct it with their own view—still, it’s somehow reminiscent of that kitchen you once shared with them.

A Saturday or two ago I stopped in at the café at Chez Panisse for lunch. Simple, seasonal, organic fare for some-odd 30 years…think of how many cooks have passed through that kitchen, how many chefs can name Alice Waters as their mentor.

I cracked open a borrowed copy of Sunday Suppers at Lucques (by Suzanne Goin, past chef at Chez Panisse) for the first time last week. I soaked it up—the content, stories, philosophy, the fresh, simple, seasonal recipes. Then, on a whim, we roadtripped to LA on Saturday. Sitting down to our dinner at Lucques, I was more than excited. The menu read very well—“spiced lamb tartare with fried chickpeas, oil-cured olives and cumin flatbread” definitely a must. But for the entrée? A toss-up. Sea bass, purple artichokes, potatoes and anchovy-black olive butter made its way to my side of the table, but only after negotiating for some traded quince paste and suckling pig swirled around in garlic-paprika oil. In the end it was disappointing. Too large of portions, too much seasoning or not enough, but mostly—too much going on in one dish (does a single salad need the entire avocado?) Someday I'll return--you can't judge a book by its cover, right? And certainly, not a book by its restaurant...

http://www.lucques.com/

(graphics great, navigation not so great)

Sonoma Farmer's Market

“On the park’s western side….there was the Ostrich Guy, an older white-bearded man in a white T-shirt and a hat with ostrich feathers. He sold frozen cuts of ostrich meat from his free-range ranch…He also sold fresh ostrich eggs for twelve dollars each. The eggs were the size of footballs. They looked as though they were laid by dinosaurs. There were two ways to cook an ostrich egg, the farmer said. You could hard-boil it, which took about three or four hours given its size, or you could panfry it up in a scramble or omelet and that way it cooked about as quickly as the usual diminutive chicken eggs. The catch was that one ostrich egg equaled something like four dozen chicken eggs…” Tale of Two Valleys, Alan Deutschman (I’m on page 47).