A lot of people were fired up after Anders Selmer’s talk during the Nordic Barista Cup this year. The audience almost cornered Anders about how restaurants so poorly executes coffee service after dinner.
To Anders defense, he is actually taking coffee seriously in his restaurant “Fiskebaren”, and I think he defended him self well by saying that if it is so important for coffee people to get great coffee in restaurants, then why don’t we do something about it?
Later that day we witnessed a great lecture by Pontus Dahlström from restaurant Maaemo in Norway. He literally showed everyone that not all restaurants take coffee for granted. The guys at Maaemo have been working on their coffee service from their start in 2010 and to be honest they are one of our most serious customers. Not only do they cup coffees a lot, they have great knowledge about coffee production, extraction, and taste.
Early this year they approached me to see if they could improve their coffee service even more in their restaurant. Since the focus of Maaemo is Nordic food they were dreaming of serving traditional steeped coffee in their restaurant, just like they make coffee when hiking in the forest, etc, but did not know how to implement this technique in the restaurant.
After a brief meeting and some demonstration they came up with what I think is the most exciting coffee service I have experienced in a very long time. It is not very often you come across such a well thought out coffee concept and it is even more enjoyable that it is in a restaurant.
So, baristas, stop complaining. Watch and learn..
PS. I have sourced some very special organic coffee for Maaemo while in Brazil, but I will write about that in a later post.