I love the name Alchemy for an espresso bar. It perfectly captures the sense of science-mixed-with-dark-magic that would seem to be required in transmuting a bunch of dried out pits into the Elixir of Life. And given that London’s Alchemy Café is located in a decidedly old part of town, not far from St. Paul’s…

Predictably, the rate at which I can visit espresso shops with the rocket cup far exceeds the rate at which I can go home and write about the experience. It would seem that the delay between visiting and blogging has grown to over three months. Oh well; I’m sure there’s a way to attribute the…

A few weeks have gone by, and I haven’t even marked the passage of time with a cat photo? What is the internet coming to? May has been pretty busy, including a pilgrimage to Granada early in the month, where I finally visited the Alhambra for the first time. Today is my twentieth anniversary, and…

I don’t know the reason why the founders of Prufrock chose that name for their café. I have to assume the name is taken from the title character of the great T.S. Eliot poem, in which case it’s natural to single out the line “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons” as the motivation (but who…

Long after I had started using the London’s Best Coffee App to fuel my Rocket Cup World Tour of London, the developers obviously responded to my psychic messages and added a feature that I had been pining for in secret: a list of the city’s newest espresso bars, sorted in reverse chronological order.  It was…

When the London’s Best Coffee app informed me that a new espresso bar had opened right on my usual route through Covent Garden up to UCL, I knew that it wouldn’t be long before I stopped by. And I’m glad I did, because the new Timberyard location has quickly become one of my favourite places…

The way I see it, I owe the success of the Rocket Cup to Cory Doctorow, who mentioned about it on Boing Boing after seeing it on the Shapeways blog. It is then especially appropriate that the cup should visit Giddy Up Coffee, since that is apparently where Cory gets his morning caffeine fix (if…

Milk Bar is a relatively new cafe that faces Soho Square—or rather, it nearly faces the mouth of an alleyway whose other end opens onto the entrance to Soho Square (close enough, right?). I don’t visit there all that often. It’s a nice enough spot, with attractive art on the walls and perfectly adequate espresso. I…

There’s something especially poetic about the name Nude Espresso. In the context of a cup of coffee, milk and sugar can hide any number of sins. They can drag you back towards the mean, flavour-wise, rounding the corners off of a less-than-stellar bean. But in the preparation of espresso, there’s nowhere to hide. The path…