As I’ve posted recently, I’ve been very lucky this spring to travel to Arizona for baseball spring training, and to Portugal with my family. Last week I enjoyed one more very special trip, driving in the US south, and of course visited some coffee places. I neglected to do my usual rounds of picture taking, but we may be better off without them.
I’ve been a big fan of Red Rooster Coffee for a while now, enjoying their coffee at some of the best DC-area cafés. Their coffee’s flavor profiles are often bold, but offer layers of complexity that make them more interesting that just smacking you in the face. I’ve wanted to visit their café and roastery, but Floyd, VA is a bit far from where I live, I’m not a bluegrass fan so a visit to Floydfest isn’t in the cards, and Floyd hasn’t been on the way to places I’ve gone before. This trip gave me the opportunity to route myself in their direction, so I built a stop into the itinerary.
I recently returned from an amazing week’s vacay with my family. Now I understand why everyone has been there, is there, is planning to go there, or wants to go there. We were blessed with mostly magical weather, manageable crowds, terrific food and drink, and very warm and friendly people.
We were mostly in Lisbon and Porto, with a few other stops. I had great coffee, though unfortunately I didn’t have the opportunity to visit as many places as I would have liked in Porto. To spare my family I didn’t go through my usual picture taking frenzy at cafés, so here’s a list interspersed with the usual tourist pics – those of you who follow my social media accounts have likely seen these – and a couple non-coffee things.
First, a tip for anyone traveling anywhere in Europe, European Coffee Trip is *the* guide you need to find specialty cafés and roasters. It quickly became my primary coffee resource for this trip.
Let’s wrap up the Phoenix field report. Two cafés left to cover.
WINDOW COFFEE BAR (Melrose)
where’s Frank? Dino? Sammy? Joey Bishop?
from the second you pull up to the Royale complex, which houses this outlet of Window Coffee Bar, you’re awash in 60’s Vegas cool and invited to find your inner rat packer as you relax in a bright metal chair on the astroturfed courtyard
the café is bright and colorful, and it took a lot of willpower not to take home one of their really cool mugs
great coffee, teas (I went back for pictures and got a really good iced herbal tea), and pastries – another fine pop tart, this one raspberry and pear
I recently met my brother in Arizona for spring training baseball. It was my first visit to the Grand Canyon State, and while we didn’t venture beyond the Phoenix metro area we did see and do a lot. Of course, for me that included visiting a lot of cafés.
I came in without expectations one way or another about the coffee scene in the Valley of the Sun, but I was pleasantly surprised with the consistently high quality. I guess that shouldn’t be a surprised, given the city’s official logo looks like latte art.
If you look at my café guide, you’ll find that all 10 places I visited made the list, 9 of which earned the Coveted Asterisk of QualityTM. Rather than indulging my usual proclivity to babble on and on (and on), I’m going to lean more on the pictures to tell the story, with an occasional touristy intervention. Let’s go!
This is the first of what I hope will become a series of interviews with coffee entrepreneurs about the choices they make in creating, building, and positioning their businesses. We begin the series with sisters Randi and Maria Milton of Rossana, a mobile coffee business in northern Virginia.
Maria: Rossana is the culmination of a long-time dream that Randi and I have had to own our own business, and our love for coffee and community.
Randi: Rossana brings more than a mobile espresso experience to you. We are handcrafting espresso beverages, coffees, teas, and small bites with the same level of love and attention of a brick and mortar café, but in a mobile setting.
What’s the meaning behind the name?
Randi: Rossana was our mother’s name. We went back and forth with different names and ideas that would fit into our concept and in the end, Rossana was perfect. Our mother impacted us in innumerable ways; our confidence in ourselves, our passion for life, and love of people, just to name a few.
Maria: Pronounced ROSS-anna. Being from the south, there is a little twang behind the name.
What were your backgrounds before starting the business?
Randi: I worked in many positions in the hospitality industry, first as a prep cook at a local establishment in our home town near Atlanta, GA when I was in my teens, and most recently as the General Manager of both Northside Social Arlington and Northside Social Falls Church. Leadership and hospitality are my passions, and coffee became a surprising bonus.
Maria: We both have had careers in the restaurant industry, and my background is heavily on the beverage side. I focused on craft beers and then moved into wine, followed by restaurant management. I worked in the Northside wine bar when I moved to Virginia, and that is where my love for coffee really started to blossom.
This was quite the weekend for coffee obsessives in the nation’s capital. Friday was National Coffee Day, Sunday was International Coffee Day, and these critically important holidays bookended Saturday’s first annual DC Coffee Festival. Held at Dock 5 in Union Market, the event sold out in advance for both sessions.
The hall was filled with roasters and cafe operators, plus a few different coffee-related businesses and a couple food purveyors. Thankfully the good people from Topo Chico were giving away free samples of cold soda water, as things got a little sweaty in a packed hall on a humid day.
My wife and I recently settled upon the crazy notion of going out for a coffee and actually drinking it in the cafe. We stopped at Kaldi’s Social House in Silver Spring, MD, and my drink was served this way:
While it was par for the course when I visited a lot of coffee shops in Denver a few years ago, it’s unusual in this area to see this presentation, including a glass of sparkling water. That one small gesture adds a lot to the experience, and I’m all for it.
This weekend I had a coffee from a café I hadn’t tried before. Some of the staff looked pretty young. I would think the guy who took my order and made my drink wasn’t older than 15 or 16.
He seemed quite serious and deliberate as he went about his business. When he was done he paused for a second, then grabbed his phone to take a picture of the drink. Very endearing.
This is the finished product:
It tasted pretty good, too!
Well done, young man. May you have a long and joyful barista journey ahead of you.
