The latest "Third Wave Coffee" (Wikipedia it!) house to open in London is the interesting new Prufrock in Leather Lane which is headed-up by the brilliant Gwilym Davies (2009 World Barista Champion).
There is something unfinished about Prufrock in Leather Lane. Not "unfinished" as in "incomplete", but rather as in "unfinished symphony" - something raw, unrevised, unedited. Something you hope will never become finished, because it is precious in its current form.
The coffee service area consists of large, varnished wooden service bars, which are dwarfed by the spacious, bright room in which they are situated, and run by People Just Like You and Me. What do I mean by this? Here's what. We first had coffee down the road in the longer-established "Department of Coffee and Social Affairs", and were served by a sophisticated but slightly abrupt young lady who could tell you nothing about the coffee she just took payment for, nor did she particularly want to look you in the eye. I'm not saying every transaction should involve ridiculous amounts of "look deeply into customers' eyes", but if it wasn't obvious from the taste of the coffee that we were in the wrong place, then it was from the service. As for the coffee itself, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't good. At least, not the good I have come to expect from Prufrock.
Here: friendly, talkative people serving coffee. Human Beings. The Holy Grail of the modern retail world.
Today I had two syphons (see my picture) of Square Mile Suke Quto Oromia, an Ethiopian coffee so deliciously peachy that you could imagine you are drinking a delicate peach tea, with a slight aniseed taste towards the end. I also had a sip of a latte which had gone slightly cold but which nevertheless blew me away. The espresso worked so well in tandem with the milk which was textured to sweet perfection.
The syphon is a brewed coffee that is made using quite a laborious process involving heating a glass bulb of water over a controlled heat source. It is a real spectacle to watch, as it resembles something you might find in a chemistry lab. If you haven't seen the process before, you should definitely check it out, sit at the bar, chat to the barista. The coffee is handed to you in the glass bulb secured to a metal clamp / stand, which you can take back to your table with a mug. It is very special indeed.
I mentioned Prufrock is spacious. It has very high ceilings, and a mixture of white brick and duck egg blue painted walls, and an array of minimalist furniture spread around. The majority of the floor space is unused (that's a good-sized dancefloor's worth of space!) which lends the place a peaceful kind of minimalism. The walls are empty; I'm sure some find this unfriendly but it creates for me a really good place to think. It's like someone installed a really amazing coffee bar inside an artist's studio.
It's clear that every detail of this coffee house has been thought-through. The brewed coffee mugs are superb for tasting, the brew bar is in a really good place, and I'm afraid to say that the minimalist atmosphere which would lend itself to business networking, art openings, and the like, makes the aforementioned place a few doors down seem positively pretentious and overblown in comparison.
Personally I don't care how pretentious or conversely how unassuming a place is, I will go where the good coffee is.
And it is here. read more