I mean, I expected to like it quite a bit. It would be a chance to get bagels from New York Bagel & Bialy without having to go up to Skokie. Plus I really like the idea of Stumptown being in Chicago. (Even though I threw a hissy fit when I heard Bagel would have Stumptown, and nobody from Stumptown would return my e-mails. I got over that. Really, I did.)

But what really got me is how good the sandwiches are. The Lox sandwich? Yum. Breakfast 1? It reminded me of everything I liked about growing up in the suburbs. Which was sitting and eating Bagels for breakfast before school. Something about an egg bagel, eggs, ham, American cheese, and yellow mustard really worked. That whole food and nostalgia thing which I think is a terrible way of writing about food? It happened to me, and I’m writing about it despite myself. That’s how much I liked it.

Ok. So. Bagel on Damen good. Writing about nostalgia in food writing bad. So more of the first, and less of the second. I’ll work on that.

:::UPDATE::: You can’t argue with the brilliance of eggs, bacon, avocado and cream cheese on an everything bagel.

Also. The Stumptown Coffee is available as whole bean or out of a Fetco brewer. Despite my coffee-by-the-cup fetishism, I really like coffee from Fetco brewers when it’s fresh. In fact, for a breakfast joint to use Fetcos is a step forward. When I lived in NY, and I went to 13th St Bagel, or H & H, or Esse, their coffee was putrid. The coffee at Bagel on Damen? It tastes good. And for the record, I don’t have a lot of experience with Stumptown, just a few shots here and here (mostly here at Buzz) so I shouldn’t be the one to say how well they do with their Stumptown beans. But I haven’t been disappointed once by the coffee at Bagel on Damen. Plus, didn’t you see the article in Time Out? Maggie McCoy is a bona fide coffee celebrity.

1/31 7p 1644 N Damen. $5 buy in, winner takes pot.

You know, to celebrate being open. Beer and baristas. Should be fun.

There is one book I know of that has more to teach about the idea of perfection than any other, and it is The French Laundry Cookbook. Really? A cookbook? Not, say, Plato’s Republic or Philebus? Of course. Because The French Laundry Cookbook makes clear that the whole point of perfection isn’t the unreachable standard by which we measure, but the striving for it. (Certain careful readers of Plato may insist here that I’m not too far from Plato here. Fair enough.)

What is clearer from The French Laundry Cookbook than in any other book is that the striving for perfection is a way of dealing with the fact of mortality. One important aspect of perfection is the avoidance of waste, and waste in The French Laundry Cookbook is always the waste of life. And the waste of life isn’t just the waste of the life of a rabbit (read the mini-essay on “The Importance of Rabbits”) but also the life of the farmer (not all at once) or the life of the cook, or the life of the diner in the dining room. Failing to strive for perfection is failing to pay due respect to life. It is giving in to death.

Once I explained that the old saw, “if it’s worth living for, it’s worth dying for” is tautological. Because living for something is dying for it, a l’il bit at a time. And great coffee is worth living for. I know because I learned it the hard way.

One of my most vivid memories in coffee was when Tony Dreyfus was giving his presentation about drip coffee at the 2008 Great Lakes Regional Barista Jam. He had all of us raise our right hands, and swear that we wouldn’t fuck up the coffee. As a barista, you’re the last pair of hands in a long chain to put hands on the coffee. You owe it to a lot of people not to fuck it up. And I carry it with me every day, the putting my hand in the air and promising. I won’t fuck up the coffee.

I miss you Liza. I really really miss you.

This has been a long time coming, but I didn’t really want to publicize it until I was altogether sure that it was going to happen. It’s happening, tomorrow, at 7 am at 1644 N Damen. I’m the barista trainer there, and the owners have basically empowered me to do whatever I want to do with the coffee and with the training. So the coffee is going to be as good as I want it to be. And I want really, really good coffee.

Yesterday and today, I had a little training minicamp, where we did the obvious taste everything on the menu, but I also led everyone through a tasting of citrus fruit (navel oranges, tangerines, clementines, mineolas, blood oranges, kumquats, and yuzu juice). With the basic navel orange, I went ahead and cut out some zest and then some pith along with. The exercise was to get everyone to take the taste less for granted, and to start focusing on descriptions. Plus citrus occurs in coffee over and over again, just like chocolate, which we also tasted through. I went through 4 kinds of Scharffen Berger, a 41, 62, 70, & 82 cacao content in order. Chocolate and citrus are nice things to say about how a coffee tastes, but I want the staff to be able to talk more specifically about it. Just when people thought I was being really overly nice to them for the tasting exercises, I made them all put a spoonful of cocoa powder in their mouths. Ew.

But it was worth it, because my trainees are becoming super adventurous about saying what they taste in the coffees, and they’re starting to trust their palettes. One thing that Rick Bayless once said which really stuck with me was that as a chef (or really even as a line cook) the basic function of your job is tasting things over and over again. The way you make sure your coffee (or even your hot potato/cold potato) tastes good is by tasting it. Gasp.

But that’s just it. I need the staff to be confident in their palates because I can’t be there every moment the shop is open. It’s really not hard, it’s just a matter of caring and paying attention. Really!

In the Atlantic Gus Rancatore declares Barismo in Harvard Square coffee worth traveling for. But this is obviously homerism from his perspective, I mean, how far does he have to go to get a cup of coffee there? The title of the article should really read, “A Great Coffeeshop in Boston, Even? Coffee no Longer Worth the Travel”. I mean, Boston is one of those cities with legendarily bad coffee. When I complained about the coffee in New York, people would tell me that at least it wasn’t the coffee in Boston.

But as much as the commenters on that article argue about which San Francisco coffeeshop is the best, I think they’re missing the real point. Great shops that pull excellent espresso, pour lovely art, and make slow coffee by the cup are springing up everywhere. Grand Rapids and Austin come to mind immediately. It’s not whether these shops are worth traveling to. It’s whether they’re worth a fifteen minute detour in your daily routine. I like to think it is.

Well, that was some kind of a year. For me, it was looking like it was quite eventful, but then it turned out that only one event really mattered. And really, it was turning out to be a really good year, too. And then Liza got killed. And it’s not as if it was just that it could have been any of us – it was in the middle of the day, the weather was clear, and she wore a helmet – but also that she was the best of us. She had that kind of talent and dedication that goes on to win barista championships. But it wasn’t Liza’s death that my year revolved around. It was meeting Liza at all. And so, yes, it was a very good year that I’ve had. And I go on to maintain that I’ve had a better, richer year for having met and lost her than never having met her at all. Liza just had that kind of effect on people, she understood everything you said, put a smile on your face, and made you demand better of yourself.

And so I demand better of myself. 2009 is the year I regained my wild perfectionist streak.

I liked how my Espresso evaluation form looked so much that I stuck with same basic skeleton. This form takes a little more explanation from a trainer to use. But it is certainly less intimidating than the standard SCAA form.

Download here

Like with the Espresso form, inquire about custom implementations.

So my roommate challenged me with the question,

If you were challenged to an omelet cooking contest, how would you make an omelet?

And I responded quite simply,

I would make an omelet with just eggs and butter and heavy cream. And that is all.

He didn’t believe me. So, I told him, try me. And he wouldn’t quite believe me. So, I showed him. 2 tbsp of butter, lightly browned over med-high heat until it started to show some color, and 3 lightly beaten eggs with a touch of heavy cream (although here, you could substitute milk or even just water). Beat the eggs until it just comes together but not completely even, and then put them into the pan just as the butter begins to brown. Allow the eggs to coagulate at the bottom, and swirl the pan to allow some of the egg to get under the coagulating bottom, and then using just a fork start to turn the omelet into a roll and then once you’ve rolled it all the way, allow it to cook another second or two, roll it onto a plate and voila.

Best omelet you’ve ever tasted. Nothing else, seriously. This is the hardest thing on earth, to pull it off the heat so that there’s still a touch of runniness in the center and eat immediately. The slightly browned butter makes it. Really, nothing else. That’s a true omelet.

Just like the hardest part of barista competition is to get the shots just right, the hardest thing about omelets is to get the eggs just right. Whatever you want to throw in it, if you get the eggs right, it will just go. Fines-herbes? Sure, if you want to get fancy. Precooked small dice potatoes, or blanched peas? Add a touch of chive. Sure. Throw in some good small dice country ham or bacon? Sure. But what makes it is the cooking the eggs just right.

The hardest things are the simplest things. It’s just getting a touch for it. Once you have that, everything else just follows. Yes, I sold him on it.

When I was calling around to request espresso samples for the new shop that I’m working for (Have you mentioned that on the blog yet even, how long has it been? –Ed. Um, probably not. A long time.) I was giving out my email address, and I said coffeespoons as in “I have measured out my life in coffee spoons…” to a roaster, who had a good chuckle at it.

Anyway today I made an evaluation form for espresso which is designed to let the barista to keep track of variables, and to get down as much information as quickly as possible to be able to communicate it to others.

Yes? Yes. Next up, a cupping evaluation form, and I start experimenting on how to make Clevers taste good.

At Keri’s last day at Dottie’s before going back to college for the year, Jess wished out loud that someone had a camera so I waved my Leica, and she said to me “but that’s a real camera!” And Jess would know the difference. In New York, we both shot Nikon FMs, and she turned me onto HP5 when she showed me a few of her prints. A real camera is used to take real pictures, what she wanted was a fake camera for an easy snapshot to upload to Facebook. I went and snapped a few off anyway, and surprised them both with a picture on Facebook a month later.

But that’s the first lesson I learned from that Leica,

1. Always be ready to shoot.

With a full manual camera, that means always playing with the aperture and shutter speed dials. Actually it turns out that it’s helpful not to have a light meter in the viewfinder so I don’t have to have the camera to my eye all the time. Hence the second lesson,

2. The art of photography is the art of learning to see.

I lost a few rolls of film near the beginning because the film rewind dial is in a most counterintuitive spot on the camera. There some shots I would like to have back, but I am never all that upset about lost photographs. I already know what they looked like, but for me taking pictures is more a form of meditative practice than about getting the shot. Even so, the most important lesson I learned so far has been,

3. Never be afraid to snap off an exposure or three to get the shot you want.

Yes, it means that there are going to be more throwaway shots, and shooting real black and white* it costs a buck for two shots. But it’s worth it, because it increases the chance that you’ll land the shot you really want. This is especially true if you take a moment to think between your shots. You have to be selective, but once you see your shot, shoot without hesitation.

But lest I forget, I keep reminding myself,

4. No matter the cachet of a camera, and no matter how hard or easy it is to operate, all it does is take pictures. Even a Leica.

*Admittedly, I haven’t stuck with real black and white so far for my Leica Year and shot some Kodak Ektar but I’ve done a lot of shooting in black and white, and I already see in luminescences. Even when I was describing this to my friend Amanda at a coffeeshop ten minutes later, the picture in my mind’s eye already looked like it was shot in HP5.