Sorry Zen, but I am going to have to bring you in for this one. Yesterday, Zen told me about a café in London that made the best coffee "in Europe" (and hence, perhaps the world?) and I realised my tastes were way too fickle to be able to say where I had had my best coffee.
When I was working in Paris I could often have three espressos in a day, all from the same cafe downstairs. On arrival at work, at around 11am, and after lunch. The 11am coffee was the best tasting, without any competition. It was the coffee that I didn't NEED, the coffee that was nearly always in the sun, the coffee that was a real pause.
I find coffee is fragile.. tell someone that a café is the best in the world and it becomes harder to like the coffee. Expectations become too high, and you start over analysing: is this coffee really all that great?
In a recent trip to Rome and Naples all of the small cafes we found suprised us with a consistently good, rich, short coffee. So we go to the cafe next to the pantheon that is meant to have the best coffee in Rome, fight a million tourists to get bench space and well... I couldn't work out what was so special about it.
Two days ago I stumbled upon a small café near the British museum that was horribly cute and served quite good coffee. The day after, I meet Kate in the same area. After an initial bad coffee in a cafe directly next to the museum (if excellent coffee is sometimes hard to distinguish, horrible coffee is universal), I suggest we have a second coffee at the same cute place. Now, on my second visit, realising I had suggested this place to someone else, I found myself more critical of the coffee and well, it no longer cut it.
The real transcendal coffees are great coffees that are unexpected. My best coffee memories: Arrival in paris after 3 weeks in the usa, arrival in barcelona after two weeks in germany, a midnight coffee in a town near florence, that place in naples that we thought was touristy and crap but ended up having such a rich blend....
The same goes for food, to some extent.
Where have I eaten the most amazing meals? My aunts place in Dourdan and my cousins place in Normandy. Not only are they good cooks who seek out excellent ingredients, there is a certain ritual involved. Away from the stress of Paris, you wake up and the food is already slowly cooking. The morning is full of smells and anticipation. A ray of sunlight comes out and everyone quickly moves the table outside. An aperitif, and now you can no longer stand it. It smells so good and you are so hungry! And the food tastes twice as good for it.
My favourite restaurants in Paris when I arrived no longer excite me. I have taken their quality of food as a norm and now only taste it when they have stuffed up a dish. Tastes change, expected quality changes. I do not eat the same things in Paris as Sydney, I will no doubt eat different things in London. Since I have been in London I have already eaten twice in china town and fuck I am loving it.
As I am currently reading "the story of art" which manages to summarise centuries of thought across an entire continent in around 5 pages, I can not help but compare movements in art to food and drink: Food and drink, where even a few hundred kilometres means an entire new cuisine, where the best cheese comes form a certain slope in a certain town at a certain time of year. Where these complexities are overlaid by your own tastes, your own state of mind. Food, the most subtle and complex of arts.
Now, you will have to excuse me. I think I have worked up an appetite.
(PS. As I have already had three Londoners talk to me about this one café since I have been here, lets see if people can guess which one Zen was talking about....)
