The next stop on my tour of London’s independent coffee houses was a café called Flat White. It features coffee from SquareMile, a boutique roaster in London. However, having just had a flat white beverage at LJ, I asked what the “long black” coffee on the menu was. Turns out it was espresso and water, commonly known as a Café Americano in the States – a drink I’ve never cared for, since to me it always tastes like very diluted coffee, with none of the interesting subtleties of its brewed counterpart. But I was told that I could get a cup of AeroPress coffee. This sounded more interesting, so I agreed. The AeroPress is a plastic cylinder that resembles an over-sized hypodermic needle. In the bottom a small filter is placed inside a cap with holes for coffee to drip through. Finely ground coffee is placed on the filter, hot water is poured inside the tube and the mixture steeps for about a minute. When the proper amount of time has elapsed, the top of the tube is pressed down, forcing the coffee though the filter and out the bottom of the device into the cup.  It made a good cup of coffee. Far better, I daresay, than a typically uninspired Americano.

After experiencing the AeroPress, on to Valdez and Sons, a few blocks away. The special of the day was an iced latte, so I decided to sample it. The milk was poured cold into the cup with ice and then the espresso was added. The drink was quite tasty, with a natural sweetness of the coffee balanced by the milk. It didn’t need sugar, and it was quite refreshing.

The final stop on my tour: Milkbar. The menu looked suspiciously similar to that of Flat White, and when I asked about it, they told me that the two cafés were indeed owned by the same person.  I decided to try their signature drink, a flat white, and was rewarded with another small ceramic cup (despite the number of times I’ve been there, it always takes a while to get used to the small sizes of cups in the U.K.!) containing the drink with a decorated rosette on top. It too was delicious.

With that, my tour was finished. I consumed four different coffee drinks and enjoyed them all. Each of the locations was in a relatively small area of London, but my map showed about another two dozen to try. My thanks to Coffee Kids for creating the map!  (Have I mentioned lately that they are a great organization and deserve support?) I’m looking forward to my next trip to London to explore the other unique cafés on the map!

(This is the first in a two-post series about a tour I recently took of some of London’s independent coffee houses.)

For a city so long synonymous with tea, London has become increasingly identified with coffee. It boasts three large chains of coffee shops in addition to Starbucks, which entered the London market almost 20 years ago. Caffe Nero, Costa, and Coffee Republic each have hundreds of locations, which is remarkable given the size of the market. (By comparison, the United States has about the same number of large coffee shop chains, yet with about five times the population.) And as the London market has become more sophisticated, smaller independent stores have opened, offering different drinks and more sophisticated coffees.

Jeremy Torz of Union Hand-Roasted has been roasting specialty coffee in the U.K. for almost 20 years and prides himself on offering the finest coffee he can source from around the world. At the recent Caffè Culture show, his stand included a brew bar to allow patrons to sample different coffees prepared in various ways. I selected a Hario pour-over from Japan and then chose among three different coffees from Rwanda. This level of diversity – three coffees from Rwanda! – is remarkable and shows the lengths to which Jeremy goes to procure the best beans possible.

Coffee Kids is a terrific non-profit organization devoted to helping coffee-growing families improve their quality of life. Coffee Kids connects producers with consumers to help educate people about the difficulties of growing coffee and living on that income. (I’ve written about these guys in the past; I encourage you to check out their website. Suffice it to say that they exist on donations alone, and any amount is welcome in helping them improve the lives of others.) Many of Coffee Kids’ donors are large and small coffee companies, and to help encourage the support of indie cafés, they created a map of London with nearly two dozen listed. Not knowing the local indie coffee scene well, I decided to investigate.

Armed with my map, I took the tube to Piccadilly Circus and began walking up Regent Street. The first shop I found was Lj Coffee House, a tiny storefront with a few tables and some overstuffed chairs. The menu proudly proclaimed that they served Union Coffee. I asked for a “flat white,” the Australian import that’s rapidly becoming popular in London. It’s espresso with steamed and foamed milk, like a cappuccino, but quite small.  Served with a latte art rosette on top, it was delicious. The coffee was strong and smooth, and the silky texture of the milk made the entire drink creamy. A perfect start to my tour of some of London’s indie cafés!

The World Tea Expo in Las Vegas is a small trade show wholly devoted to tea. Because I spend so much time with specialty coffee retailers, I’ve learned a lot over the years about coffee and where it is from, how it is processed, and how it is consumed and sold.  And for the past 20 years, I have been hearing that “tea is the next big thing.” But that has never materialized. Certainly there are some successful retailers of loose and packaged tea, and some smaller chains selling specialty tea drinks. Most of the growth in tea in recent years, however, has been in premium tea bags produced by companies such as Mighty Leaf, Numi, Rishi and Adagio. Finally, it seems the situation is changing, and more and more tea is becoming available to serve in many ways.

This trade show was certainly a revelation. Walking the aisles, I passed booths for growers from such countries as Sri Lanka and India and was surprised to sample a tea grown in New Zealand. Other booths offered samples of different tea drinks, and I tasted a new tea drink from Ecuador called Guayusa that reminded me of mate, the tea from Argentina drunk from a gourd. Tisano was an interesting tea made from the shells of cocoa beans and had a strong, aromatic chocolate flavor. Another booth sold only matcha, the powdered Japanese green tea used in the tea ceremony, and yet another featured only rooibos, the red bush tea from South Africa.

As I walked, I was struck by the different aromas from each booth. Walking a coffee show, one certainly is aware of the aroma of coffee, but even with different varietals, the smell is distinctively that of coffee. At the Tea Expo, however, there were myriad aromas. Some of the teas were black and smoky, such as Lapsang Souchong. Others had lighter tea notes like oolong and orange pekoe. Fruit-flavored tisanes smelled of mango, passionfruit and raspberry. Delicate white teas had floral scents such as lavender and jasmine. It was a riot of flavors, aromas, scents and smells.

I left the show with a bag of samples and literature. Now I’m thinking about how to use tea in drinks for our customers to serve both hot and iced. I have a few ideas. And though it’s been a long time coming, I think that tea is finally becoming the next big thing.

Imagine a world filled with candy and chocolate where you can sample chocolate bars, fizzy drinks, bubble gum, cotton candy, licorice and gum drops. No, it’s not Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Factory – it’s the National Confectioner’s Association Sweets & Snacks Expo. Thousands of brands, iconic and new, are on display, exhibiting all manner of sweets and snacks. Some are a flashback like Bazooka gum and Pop Rocks.  Others are everyday indulgences like M&M’s. And others are new and unusual ways to eat sweets. Or inhale them.

Le Whif bills itself as “inhalable cuisine.” Inside a small, plastic, lipstick-sized tube is a very fine chocolate or coffee flavored powder. To experience it, you place the tube in your mouth and inhale. The powder in your mouth gives you all of the flavor promised but with none of the calories or the effect of feeling full. It is an interesting sensation. They gave me both chocolate and coffee and I enjoyed both. Certainly different than eating a chocolate bar or drinking a cappuccino!

Le Whif was developed in France and began selling in boutiques in Paris last year.  Now it’s available in the United States and its creators say it’s selling well at stores such as Dylan’s Candy Bar, a well-known specialty candy and confectionery store in Manhattan. This could be the beginning of a new trend of inhaling lots of interesting, unusual flavors. I look forward to it.

I was recently in Chicago for the annual National Restaurant Association trade show, still the biggest restaurant show in the country. It is known in the industry as the NRA, but for butter and not guns.

While there, I stopped in to a new restaurant by well-known food authority and chef Rick Bayless. Called Xoco (and pronounced SHO-koh), it is adjacent to his other restaurants, Topolobampo and Frontera Grill. Xoco is a casual operation, serving food quickly, but not fast food. Everything is fresh, and the attention to detail and care of preparation is evident. I loved the fact that I had chocolate in each part of my meal.

Mole is a wonderful dish, a savory sauce made from chocolate. Most people don’t think of chocolate as anything other than a sweet dessert, but for centuries cacao beans have been used to flavor meats in Mexico and Central America, notably pork and chicken.  My pork mole sandwich consisted of shredded pork and onions flavored with chocolate on a hearty, toasted roll.

Churros are a dessert that is basically fried dough dusted with flavored sugar. The churros were served with a small cup of very thick, rich chocolate. The churros are meant to be dipped in the chocolate, and the combination of the sugary churros combined with the dark, thick, unsweetened chocolate is fantastic.

I was completely satiated when I left. But I’m thinking I’ll return soon and try the house-made vanilla ice cream with homemade chocolate sauce…