As an intimacy devotee, I tend to go deep fast. I don’t greet people with the typical “How are you?” but instead express some rendition of, “Hi, let’s go deep.” One of my closest girlfriends in college used to say, “Rios, have a beer.” She meant well. She wanted me to lighten up. And even though I don’t like beer, I got what she meant. She loves me and wanted me to stop feeling the weight of the world’s oceans on my shoulders. (Thanks, Shirl.)
So today I’ll lighten up and celebrate pleasure, that thing we might hope to inhale with our last breaths, whenever they visit our lungs.
Have you ever had a world class cappuccino, the kind that billows with dense milky pleasure pillows of foam, that greet your lips and tongue like heaven’s silken pearls? This pic is two sips into a dose of milky-spresso’d magic at my neighborhood café.
I first fell for foam back in college. A friend owned a downtown Chico, California café called The Naked Lounge, where baristas were scrupulously trained to make what I later learned is the most difficult espresso drink to make well.
*Note: In 2007, he moved to Santa Cruz and founded Verve Coffee Roasters with his best friend, at none other than… ☺️ Pleasure Point. They’re now world renowned; he doesn’t play small.
I was hooked. When it’s masterfully made, cappuccino foam is one of the greatest pleasures in the human experience.
In all my café visits in the last 30 years, from San Francisco to Sweden and San Diego to Chicago, I have found that a miniscule percentage of baristas nail it. One in 200, at best (.5%). So today I salute the baristas who’ve mastered cappuccino foam, an art that gifts my palate with sensuous joy.
In the late ‘90s, I filmed and posted YouTube videos of highly skilled baristas whipping up silken ecstasy. Now I simply give thanks for the four baristas at my neighborhood café, Petaluma Coffee & Tea, who’ve mastered foam. That’s a world record; most cafés don’t even have one. Stop in at Petaluma Coffee & Tea Company next time you’re in town.
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