We made a stop at Sur Coffee over the past weekend. It’s a cafe with a roastery in San Clemente, the small, beautiful beach city built on the rolling slopes of a mountain that descends down to a scenic stretch of southern California beach. We were passing through town onContinue Reading
Yes, savvy reader, it’s true. Almost everybody’s favorite Seattle, Washington-based, international speciality-coffee chain has a design flaw in its familiar, if not ubiquitous, mermaid logo. Can you spot it? Do you see it? What is it? Look closely at the logo. (And c’mon now — don’t Google the answer! WeContinue Reading
The space at Daydream Coffee and Surf in Costa Mesa, California is great, but it’s missing a few things that would make it perfect: A bed, a TV, and a set of keys to the space with our name on it.
The logo for Intelligentsia Coffee’s “Black Cat” Espresso is the head of a black cat. It’s a bold and literal graphic with class and style, rendered so that the cat’s head is seen from a 3/4-angle, giving it some visual dimensionality. Intelligentsia has put the Black Cat logo on someContinue Reading
As the pix below show, Tuesday was a “snow day” here in New York City due to the massive winter storm, dubbed Juno, that started hitting the city Monday afternoon. But while the blizzard started out big, blustery and with very heavy snowfall Monday, the second wave of the stormContinue Reading
On our recent visit back to Tokyo, we picked up a bag of freshly-roasted espresso beans from Bear Pond Espresso at their cafe at On the Corner in Shibuya. We love the totally unbranded, shiny, silvery bag — it’s only markings are the roasting batch and date numbers.
This signage made our day. It’s in front of the Jolly Goat, a tiny espresso bar in Hell’s Kitchen, in New York City, and reads: “Water is the Most Essential Element of Life Because w/out water you can’t make coffee.” True.
We stopped by the recently minted New York City outpost of Intelligentsia Coffee in Chelsea, an NYC neighborhood that is home to the city’s largest art galleries and, as such, a global art-world hub. The new Intellgentsia is actually two distinct cafes: a smart, beautifully designed cafe in the lobbyContinue Reading
We just picked up this artfully crafted “La Cupola” espresso maker by Alessi at the Eataly foodie emporium in Smeraldo, in Milan, Italy. We couldn’t resist, what with coffee being something close to sacred to us here at GG, and the design of this device making it an object ofContinue Reading
Zebra House Coffee is probably the best place to get an espresso coffee in the surf-mecca Southern California town of San Clemente. It’s a laidback cafe and a fine space to sip on an iced Americano while flipping through back issues of Surfer magazine. In fitting SoCal fashion, Zebra offersContinue Reading
Lately we’ve started popping into the recently opened Happy Bones Coffee a lot. (See pix below.) Happy Bones is an Aussie Kiwi-staffed espresso cafe in downtown New York City. It’s a tiny place with three tables on an short, less-remarkable stretch of Broome Street in the ill-defined, mashed-up border areaContinue Reading
We recently popped by Propellor Coffee in Greenpoint, Brooklyn on one of those interminable snowy days during this year’s remarkably harsh winter in New York City. This cafe is a solid, local ‘third-wave” coffee joint with much more generous space than many of the miniscule espresso bars that these daysContinue Reading
Super delicious macarons at Cafe Grumpy, an espresso bar and cafe in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, including the one pictured here with a cute broken heart graphic printed on it. Yummy! Pop-cultural reference: This Cafe Grumpy is used as the location set for the Cafe Grumpy that appears in Lena Dunham’s hitContinue Reading
We paid a visit to Lot Sixty One Coffee Roasters’s espresso bar and roastery on Amsterdam’s Kinkerstraat street. Lot 61 was opened in early 2013 by Australian coffee connoissuer and entrepreneur Adam Craig, who used to live in New York City, where he had opened and run the acclaimed CultureContinue Reading
Merry Christmas! Happy holidays! We’re in NYC this Christmas day and although we don’t usually get caught up in the holiday traditions — it’s just not our thing — it’s nice to see a Christmas tree as we sip a hot Blue Bottle cappuccino on this very cold Christmas afternoonContinue Reading
Surfer wetsuits hanging out to dry on a sidewalk clothes rack on Orchard Street in front of Lost Weekend NYC, a surfing-themed cafe and shop in New York’s “Below Delancey” neighborhood of the Lower East Side (LES). The small cafe is a magnet for neighborhood regulars, surfers, and art-fashion-media andContinue Reading