Nancy Rommelmann

Coffee for Everyone!

Ristretto Roasters is (drumroll, please) featured in the December issue of Bon Appetit, in the What to Buy Now holiday gift guide. They've chosen the Kenya as a great gift to send. And you can! Very easily, by logging on to the Ristretto Roasters site. Your online purchase will be personally downloaded by our able-bodied shipping consultant (aka, me), and filled and taken to the post office by the guy in the company who does that (aka, my husband). If you order next week, you get a cute little card in the box. Happy holidays!

Contrary to Appearances...

I am not deranged! But really, how can anyone look anything but a proper mess compared to Izadora, the beautiful, perpetually-smiling, hair-maven daughter of Matt Welch and Emmanuelle Richard? We all had coffee today, as well as with Michael Totten, at Ristretto Williams. And while it was wonderful, super-wonderful to see them, and to talk shop, the highlight for me may have been being able to feed Izi a bottle.

"You miss it?" asked Emmanuelle. Gee, what gave it away?

The Northwest's Best Cup of Coffee!

  500 Things to Eat Before It’s Too Late: And the Very Best Places to Eat Them
Jane Stern and Michael Stern. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $19.95 paper (448p) ISBN 9780547059075
Veteran road dogs and James Beard Award-winning food journalists Jane and Michael Stern (Roadfood, Two for the Road) have what may be their best offering yet in this easy to use, consolidated guide to America’s best off-the-beaten-path eateries. Along the way, the Sterns identify the best of everything crave-worthy: regional specialties like cheese steaks in Philly, southern sweets like banana pudding and key lime pie, as well as (admittedly subjective) national rankings for classics like ribs, burgers and French fries. They even scour elusive vendors like Connecticut hot dog wagons and San Francisco taco trucks. Other notable suggestions: a cool glass of the Latino rice milk beverage Horchata at Guelaguetza in L.A., the Northwest’s best cup of coffee at Ristretto Roasters in Portland; and the best cherry pie in Michigan at Beulah’s Cherry Hut. Homebodies can make do with a handful of recipes (including Cincinnati five way chili, and Massachusetts’s Dirt Bomb, a cinnamon and sugar-rolled muffin), but the Sterns’ lyrical and enthusiastic field reports, topped off with suggestions for after-meal exploring (Philadelphia’s medical anomalies museum, New Orleans’s Audobon Insectarium), should be enough to get any reader with a taste for mom-and-pop Americana hungry for the road. (June)

Overheard Today at the Coffee Shop

Woman, 40s: "So I'm going into Safeway, the one of Broadway with a Starbucks in it, and this homeless guy comes up to me and says, 'Can you get me a Frappacino?' I told him, a Frappacino is like five bucks -- I'd buy him a cup of coffee."

Man, 70s: "I had my flag out there at five this morning -- I'm a veteran. Some gal from down the street comes up later, with another gal, and asks me what war I was in. I tell her to guess. 'Korea?' she says. I tell her, a little before that, and her friend says, 'World War 1?' I tell her, no, that little war in between."