myShoggoth

Lyonnais Coffee

We're now in Lyon, and I have a few small updates to make in the coffee arena.  I've had a few very nice coffees, including at top notch restaurants (including L'Etage), a coffee stand/bar placed near the main pedestrian bridge across the Saone, and tonight at a cafe above the Raconte-Moi La Terre.  I stand by my assessment that the overall coffee quality is about on par with the United States:  You can find the good stuff at speciality stores and some restaurants, but there isn't an overall pride in it that you see in Italy.

Where France just rules from orbit is with the food: unbelievable.  I can also understand where Lyon got its reputation, we've been stuffing ourselves beyond reason with amazing food.  My only regret is that we're not staying longer and I can't try out each and every one of the world class stuff-yourself-silly-eterias that this place is lousy with.  I'd have to buy a jacket to get into some of them, but hey I'd be willing to make sacrifices.

Now we have future TBD sketchy plans laid out for one vacation in the French Riveria, and one for Lyon and the surrounding areas (especially the French Alps).  No idea when that will happen, and we still have northern France to go on this trip.

So far most everyone in Italy and France have both been very nice, patient, and helpful despite our basic lack of knowledge of either language.  We're adding to our vocabularies to get by, but it is mostly individual words and short phrases.  In fact, the wife is downstairs in the bookstore as I type buying a phrase book intended for French speakers looking for English phrases, because we just plain can't find a English speaker's French phrase book in France.  So buy one before you get here, or you'll have to improvise like we're doing.

Southern France especially lived up to its reputation for extremely nice and helpful people, I'm really hoping that Paris fails to live up to its reputation for rude and unhelpful folk.

Small update:  The phrase English phrase book for French speakers is very entertaining, the only thing it really lacks that the opposite would have is help with the French pronouciation.

Even More Nice Coffee

We just finished breakfast in Nice and I had a couple cafe au laits, which was close to the Italian latte machiatto in my opinion.  Mostly milk with a small amount of coffee added for the caffeine and as flavoring.  The quality of the coffee itself is pretty unimportant, since its flavor can't cut through the milk enough to get noticed unless it is very strong.

This is one reason why the espresso style works so well in the latte, it has a strong enough flavor to cut through the milk and be noticed.  It is still very muted, and any subtlety in the flavors are all lost.  Yes, there is subtlety in good espresso, and yes it is lost in the coffee milkshakes a lot of people love.

That works to the advantage of coffee providers, since they don't have to differentiate based on quality of coffee (which is very difficult at large scale) but on the rest of the ingredients that the coffee itself accompanies.

We only got one night and maybe half a day total in Nice, which is a big shame and we will definitely be back here again for a longer vacation on the French Riveria.  Based on our one night I can heartily recommend Hotel Felix (which we got from the Fodor's 2004 guide to France).  I'm writing this sitting on our balcony over the pedestrian mall area after having had an excellent breakfast at the patisserie next door (where in a stroke of genius the hotel proprietor outsources his breakfasts to), and all I can think is how nice it would be to stay and explore this area more.

However, the vacation we have planned has us heading to the Provence area next. I'm sure we're going to have a fantastic time.

How good was breakfast?  While eating I quoted History of the World Part I:  It is good to be the king.

So far my opinion is that Italian coffee is far and above the best, maybe in the world for general quality level.  French coffee quality is about on par with American, hardly anything special.

Nice Coffee

We're in Nice now, and I've had two interesting coffee experiences I want to share.

The first is a cappuccino during lunch, which came with added sugar and chocolate.  I can more or less understand the idea, because in many ways cappuccinos and lattes are dessert drinks, with a small amount of coffee and a lot of milk.  Latte machiattos are even more so in the same vein.  But I just don't get adding stuff like that before giving it to the customer, rather than giving them the tools to be depraved with their coffee themselves.

After dinner we were given the dessert menu and to my surprise they had extensive coffee listings, including five named origins:  Costa Rica, Papua New Guinea, Pure Colombian, Moka Ethiopian, and Java Blue Mountain.  It wasn't specified what brewing method would be used (my wife was hoping for French Press, or what she hoped they would call.... "Press").  I ordered Moka Ethiopian out of curiosity, and it came out espresso style.

First, 'Pure Colombian' was an interesting term, and not one I'd associate with coffee first and foremost.  Second, Moka Ethiopian is a strange term.  Moka coffees generally describe coffees that come from the Arabian peninsula, such as Yemen.  Ethiopia is the origin of coffee, and there it grows wild.  Maybe it was a blend.

As for taste, I knew what I was in for when they put the cup in front of me.  Ethiopian and most other African coffees tend to have a lot of acidity, which give them a tanginess similar to the bite of citric acid.  It can make them outstanding, and pretty much unsuited for espresso.

The ending taste of a coffee is dependant on many things, including:

Coffee origin - the factors here are the strain of the plant being used, soil conditions, weather conditions, and processing/storage.
Brewing method - brewing coffee is all about getting the oils out of the beans and into the water while leaving in as much of the bitter compounds as possible, each brewing style attempts to do this in a different way and tend towards different tasting characteristics.

Unfortunately, the espresso brewing style tends to highlight acidity, and if you take a coffee that is highly acidic to begin with it can be overwhelming.  This is what I knew would happen when the waiter set down the Moka Ethiopian, and sure enough it had a strong bite like a lemon juice.  Drinkable, tasty, but if it were me I would have definitely gone with a vacuum brewing method instead.  Not the best use of the beans at all, if not a waste.

Train Coffee

The coffee on the train from Milan to Nice is instant.  There is no God.

I'm not sure how they get away with it, otherwise the Italians seem to take their coffee very seriously and I've had very good coffee in places I otherwise wouldn't expect it.  Hotels, touristy restaurants, other places where in the US I'd fully expect garbage.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised, though, considering this is the food service on public transport and those seem to be universally the worst around.  If anyone is going to half-ass it, they're at the front of the line.

The train coach we are on looks like it is from the 70s or maybe even the 60s, and since it appears to have the original interior I have no real hope of conditions improving until we get to Nice.

We lost two of our Sherpa a few stations back.  Hopefuly we won't have to resort to cannibalism (again).

So if you hear an announcement on an Italian train of 'Chef Express', cower in a corner and try to blend into the background, hope they don't notice you.  And get your coffee before you get on the train.

I just heard the bell for the service cart, better stop moving.  Ciao.

Calling All Designers

Are you a designer, artist, or other 'creative'?  Go check out Creature House Expression 3, available as a free download.  The catch is that you need to log in with a Passport, but the consensus is that it is worth the trouble.  It is a very high quality vector graphics tool that has shipped for many years (the downloadable version is 3.3), and is available due to the Microsoft aquisition a little over a year back.  There are Mac and a Windows versions.

Please try it out and give feedback.  There's a Microsoft hosted NNTP newsgroup (microsoft.expression) with an active base of experts and users who can answer questions and where you can post feedback and thoughts on the product.  Several of the long time users have websites with tutorials, samples, and posts of artwork they have created using the product.

Milanese Coffee

Quick coffee review from Milan:

1. Cappuccino at breakfast in the hotel was wonderful (about the only thing we liked about the hotel).

2. Espresso machiattos at the restaurant in the Galleria at the Duomo were good but not great, and the quality between the two I had (one at the beginning of lunch and one after) varied quite a bit.

We're taking the train from Milan to Nice tomorrow bright and early (leaves at 7:10am), so I'm very likely to have many coffees on that long ride (10 hours or so) to report on.

In sum I think Italian coffee is as good as its reputation.  The only reason I'm not going to miss it is because I roast my own, and if I get the desire for Italian style I can make it myself.  One thing I might miss is quality Baristas who are not either moody teenagers or alternative hipsters (or both) that want to correct my pronouciation of made up Italian words for coffee milkshake sugar drinks.

Venetian Coffee

Quick review of the coffee in Venice.

All in all, very very nice.  My normal drink has been espresso machiatto, and in most cases they have been wonderful.  Had the first one in a random restaurant in the touristy area near San Marco, and it shocked me by being so incredibly good.

Another one that was about as good was at another restaurant near our hotel.  Other places had very good (but not quite as good) coffee, with the only let down being at Murano.  It was drinkable, and better than you'll get at some espresso stands in the States, but a real downer compared to what I'd gotten used to.

Another surprise is that the coffee served by our hotel for 'breakfast' was really quite good.

Most of this (except possibly the Murano coffee) does not seem to have much or any Robusta content, and from what I remember that's generally true of Northern Italy coffee.  Clean, smooth, and very tasty.  Despite the perception coffee beans used in espresso need not, nor are they usually, roasted nigh unto charcoal, and the concept of an "Espresso Roast" as sold back home is just silly.  Espresso is a style of brewing, not roasting.

Anyhow, the coffee side of this trip has been very successful so far, and once we arrive in Milan in an hour or so it will be time to continue the investigation.

Comments and Discussions

I don't have a discussions forum kind of setup on this blog, as you no doubt have noticed.  There are a few reasons for this, but it is contrary in some ways to the concept of blogging so I want to touch on why that's true and why I think the comments stuff is kinda silly.

First, I don't want the overhead.  Especially with comment spamming and assorted other things going on, managing such a forum is a tax I'm not particularly keen on signing up for.

Second, it seems a poor use of technology.  There are two reasons why having a comments section is good:  for anonymous commenting, and for people who don't have their own hosted web pages.

I've seen many cases where people have blog-to-blog conversations.  I post an entry, you post a response (and link to the original), and so forth.  What is really nice about this model is that you own your content and I own mine and the fact that they related to each other is fully captured by the links.  Like the web was created for.

But if my comments are hosted on your server, now I lose control of my content.  You have to maintain it, manage it, make sure it isn't spam, and so on.  Web aggregators such as RSS Bandit can already cross reference blog posts.  Some of this relies on more than just the static web pages my site is made up of, but in theory there's no reason that my RSS or RSS+ can't contain all the information I want it to so you can know who I was referencing and why.  I'll have to investigate traceback markup and see if it does what I want it to do, which is essentially to publish in my RSS the posts I reference so that smart clients can connect things up properly.

Just looking over some example XMLs in my RSS Bandit cache doesn't tell me anything useful.  Guess I'll have to read over some specs once I get the motivation and a network connection (still on the train from Venice to Milan, no wifi on the train alas).

The only question then becomes how do I know when people have commented on my stuff?  Luckily, due to the egos involved with the blogosphere, I don't think there's much of a problem when you have entities such as Google and Technorati doing the work.  Once enough RSS feeds are in any particular place it is a straightforward problem is tie them all together, and a less straightforward problem to make a nice user experience for navigating those conversations.

[Note: I still haven't done this research, putting it on my to-do list now]

This Old Blog

Hi.

When I first started this website/blog, it languished for a while before I got serious about putting up some content that anyone would really care about.  I think there's enough now for some kind of critical mass, so rather than demanding that I continue to put up stuff that meets some kind of 'article' feel like I have in the past I'm going to generally switch over to more of a conversational feel with occasional articles on topics as I get the request or urge to post them.

My name is Andrew Boardman, and I'm a lead developer at Microsoft.  Some of you no doubt knew that because I get a lot of traffic from a link at http://blogs.gotdotnet.com/, but I've gotten at least one email from someone who didn't know who I was, just that the website exists.

I'm currently on a train from Venice to Milan, on a much needed vacation.  Working at Microsoft can be very stressful and engrossing (although that really varies based on the part of the company you're working for), and it has been a while since I last took a long vacation.  We started in Venice and are going to make our way to Paris over a total of three weeks.  So far it is great.

I've had a lack of things to talk about on the blog for a few reasons, including nearly a year in a position that ended up not working out for a variety of reasons.  I'm partially hoping that this vacation will help me kick start the writing again.

Buon Giorno, grazie to all of those who are subscribed to my RSS and haven't given up on me due to lack of posts.

Ciao.