Sunday, August 29, 2010

The bad taste of the town, once more

Good One (42 Douglas Street), off the uber-trendy Ponsonby Road, lacks a kitchen, but makes up for it with lamb sausage rolls and sardines on toast. This no-nonsense, post-industrial shed is a proper beanhead's mecca that leads the way in the lastest trend – filter coffee. Forget those clumsy, 80s, plastic monstrosities; this is how to imbibe single-origin beans.

I am presented with a wooden tray that holds a mug with a dainty ceramic filter, milk and a jug of hot water. Big in Japan, I am told, and the process hints at the elegance of that nation's tea ceremony. Ethiopian Yirgacheffe coffee has a burnt toast taste that is oddly warming.
In short, wank; Grauniad wank, but wank nevertheless. Since when was Ponsonby Road uber-trendy? It is the realm of the senseless: by day, the lumpen bourgeoisie roam, with their dogs and their high-tech pushchairs, in search of gifts of the kiwiana kind. Come nightfall, the ghastlies - men in striped shirts and women in not very much at all - overflow from bars which doubtless they think of as sophisticated.

In any case, what sort of writer says of anything that it is uber-trendy? And how about that filter coffee then? For the price of a small car you bought a coffee machine the size of a small car and now filters are the thing. That must hurt.

This morning's burnt toast had a burnt toast taste that was oddly warming.


5 comments:

Robyn said...

You know, this sort of coffee making has a name - Third Wave Coffee.

I'm not sure what the first and second waves were, but I suspect at least one of them involved Nescafe.

There are a couple of cafes in Wellington that do filter coffee - neither in particularly trendy areas, which probably makes them even cooler.

The best thing about filter coffee - it's cheaper and less bitter than bitch-arse espresso.

Paul said...

According to Wikifuckenpedia, Third Wave coffee is an artisanal foodstuff.

I had some filter coffee at an art show opening in the uber-trendy but largely unlet Irongate building. The barista made it very carefully, wetting the filter paper with hot water before putting in the coffee. Of course, at these events one usually gets pissed on red wine, so the coffee was refreshingly novel.

Megan Clayton said...

I am going to derail, ever so slightly, by mentioning that until I had this baby I did not know there was such a thing as a thousand-dollar pushchair. Most of the mainstream baby stores stock at least one model at that price. (The stroller we chose cost less and appears to be made entirely of pockets.)

Philip Matthews said...

I wonder if the phrase "bustling Epsom joint" -- from the Guardian article -- has ever appeared in print before. Somehow I doubt it.

Modou Fox said...

I had my first brush with filter coffee in the form of Square Mile's Penny University. It was worth it just for the ceremony and spectacle.
(warning: pretentious level is set to 11)
http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/05/28/ristretto-londons-penny-university/

Funnily enough Redchurch St is the new site for the Allpress London operation. I'm imagining some kind of gang-land barista turf war...