Thoughts: What this Means… Food, Booze, and Airports
Still working on an image fix for Wordpress, so pardon the stark text.
Okay, we’ve all been wondering: can food, booze, and an airport really change the face of coffee?
We’re sitting on a precipice here. I’m not one to toot my own horn, but the new Pasadena Intelligentsia is a big deal. Like, a really big deal. And there are two reasons for it: food and booze. Forget about coffee for a moment. The two more universally liked things on the planet are food and booze, and good food and good booze are generally easy to appreciate.
Think on it for a second — you can’t always pass along a siphon brew of a beautiful Kenya to your grandpa and expect him to like it. It’s probably not what he recognizes as coffee. You can, however, give him a nice plate of food and a great beer, and he’ll be able to recognize the difference in a heartbeat.
The goal of the specialty coffee industry is to bring great coffee to as many people as possible. Coffee is already a universal idea, just not in the way we would want it to be. Far too often new coffee establishments open that seem to cater only to those people who already work there. Penny University was an amazing concept, but really their scope was extremely limited. And this is why the Pasadena location is important.
Offering great food, and soon a craft beer and short wine list, Pasadena is a bridge outwards. There’s something great happening on their Yelp! page. Take a look. Nary a one of those reviews is from someone who’s attended for a V60 or siphon or a single origin espresso. These folks are then exposed to great coffee.
And there’s another reason why it’s important, too. The average chef generally doesn’t have a well-developed coffee palate. It’s just not always a priority. But. The average barista generally does have a beer, wine, and food palate. It’s part of the reason why they’re in coffee. They love expansive flavors, and hunting them down. You can always trust a barista to tell you where the best food and spirits in a town are, and even better is the option of the barista serving them to you at his or her own establishment.
In terms of mass appeal and exposure, this Pasadena Intelligentsia is definitely helping crack open the protective shell that specialty coffee has developed in the past few years.
And on that note, let’s jump over the boring Midwest out to LaGuardia airport. There’s something amazing that has popped up. A major company with licenses for a variety of coffee chains and leases in airports has forsaken the familiar for the spectacular, in a risky move that’s part of LaGuardia’s revamped dining options.
World Bean is offering espresso from a Slayer, V60 pour overs, and coffee from Intelligentsia, Eccco, Counter Culture, and others. Their coffee program alone is fantastic enough to welcome great attention, but the fact that it is in an airport is the keystone to this here proclamation: World Bean could single-handedly change the public opinion about specialty coffee.
Far too often, the best chefs ignore the best coffees. It’s an after-thought in their own restaurants. But like all palate-slaves, they’re often intrigued by great coffee, and when given the option, they will hunt it down. So, say, if you’re a world class chef traveling the world and you happen to run through LaGuardia…
Just made a V60 of Finca el Puente for Michael Lomonaco, and pretty much blew his mind. Expect great coffee from the NYC restaurant world… 2:35 PM Sep 3rd via Twitter for iPhone
I have to admit, that line of thinking is a bit of a stretch, but airports are terrible. It’s a never-ending waiting game, and airport kiosks are usually the worst. So if World Bean becomes successful, then every day passengers are constantly exposed to excellent coffee. That’s the beauty. It’s high quality specialty coffee, and you don’t have to convince anyone to come find it. It’ll find you. And if this location is successful and they start to build more across the country…
Well, it might start an entire coffee revolution before we even know it.
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