Tea Leaves

La Prima Espresso

In a wonderful rant, psu talks about the perfect cup of coffee, and how there's only one place in Pittsburgh -- La Prima Espresso -- to get it. His conclusion is that it's pointless to buy an expensive espresso machine like a Silvia because it still won't be as good as what we can get at La Prima.

He's right and wrong. Whether or not getting a fancy espresso machine is "worth it" is of course a judgment call, but I agree that generally what you're going to make for yourself isn't going to be as good as what you get at a good café, if only because of what I like to call the "hot dog in Yankee stadium" effect. You can come really close, but fundamentally no matter how interesting I make my house, it's not likely to have old Italian men smoking cigars and playing Scopa and trying to hit on the cute Italian teacher from Shadyside Academy while people come in and buy fresh pastries from Antonio next door and jostle to make sure that Elio pulls their coffee instead of the annoying kid with the buzz cut.

OK, maybe not everyone likes that ambience. But I do. Hot dogs taste better when you're actually in Yankee stadium.

We have a Silvia at work. You can make great coffee with it. But fundamentally, a cappucino at work doesn't taste as good as one near Campo dei Fiori. There's also the financial angle: a cappucino is $3/cup at la prima, rounding up. That's 200 cups of coffee before you break even on a Silvia / Solis Maestro combination, and that's if we only count equipment and not raw materials. Of course, you may find joy in the process of making the coffee yourself, which is hard to put a price tag on. But if you don't, unless you're drinking many per day, it makes sense to pay for your coffee by the dose instead.

Personal to psu: the lousiest, skankiest train station in Rome makes a better espresso than Café de Flore, although I make no promises as to ambience.

Pete's also right and wrong about Starbucks. He's right that it's a shame that they promote the retarded Seattle style cappucino -- newflash, geniuses, the hood in cappucino is supposed to come from the milk mixing with the foam from the coffee, not from freakishly aerated milk -- but I think he forgets that just 10 years ago if you wanted a cup of coffee on the Pennsylvania Turnpike you pretty much ended up drinking stale Maxwell House that had been cooking for 12 hours. Starbucks' brewed coffee, at least, is better than that.

Synchronicitously, Goob gives some tips on how to make good coffee at home without spending $500 on an espresso machine and $100 on a grinder. His advice is good -- freshness really does trump everything else. For home use, I'm pretty happy with my Bodum vacuum pot, which only ran me about $50 or so.

Additional Resources

• La Prima Espresso has a web site. The guy in the picture in the lower right is Elio, who pulls the best coffee.


• psu's coffee rant. Paul's coffee advice.


• One popular coffee fanatic's site is Whole Latte Love


• For window shopping, I like CoffeeGeek


• Too Much Coffee Man is the cartoon for the web-savvy caffeine addict.


• The Rancilio Silvia is a nice machine.