On Leaving
You may well have heard that I'm leaving New York to move to
California, San Francisco to be precise. I have mixed feelings. I've
really come to like NY over the past (almost) 3 years, but the bay
area and San Francisco have their charms too. Particularly in the
weather department.
Anyway, I've been doing things in NY that I've wanted to do for a
while but hadn't gotten around to, like walking across the Brooklyn
bridge, seeing the botanical gardens and visiting top of the rock
(as in the Rockefeller Centre). Additionally, there was a new coffee
place I wanted to check out:
Oslo Coffee Company. Order: 1 skinny cap.
Foam: reasonable. Latte art: unremarkable, barely visible attempt at a
heart.
Espresso: very weak, to the point where all I could taste was milk.
To summarize, I don't think I'd visit again. The first bad sign
was that the cup was way too big for a 1-shot drink. That means the
espresso is drowned in milk and you can barely taste it, and is a
strategy used frequently by places that can't actually make good
espresso. And to think I ordered the small!
In fact, a proper coffee house will only have one size of cappuccino,
because espresso shots come in discreet quantities and there is
only one good ratio [1] of espresso to milk. Meaning you make a small
single-shot cappuccino or a double-shot one that's twice as big,
and most folks can't drink the 2x one before it gets cold.
[1] A slight lie, of course. There is a small range of ratios that
work, and within that range there are infinitely many ratios. But
this doesn't really affect my reasoning.
