Roast Mortem

the main shop.

“Good morning,” I called to the lanky back of my assistant manager.

Tucker Burton turned around, tossed his floppy brown mop, and flashed a footlights-worthy grin. “Well, hello, sleepy head! How are you?”

I avoided a direct answer, which might have resulted in a primal scream. Instead I firmly tied my apron strings and pointed to our machine.

“How’s she running today?”

“Not bad.”

I didn’t reply. I didn’t have to. Tucker already knew what to do next. He turned back to pull me a test shot, so I could judge how bad “not bad” really was.

The machine itself was a beauty, reliably stable when it came to maintaining temperature and pressure. The espresso was what worried me. Like a gifted but temperamental child, my favorite elixir had easy days and difficult days; days of generous glory with lush, oozing crema, and days of stingy infamy with thin, diluted sourness.

The process of coaxing every bit of sweetly caramelized flavor from Matt’s superlatively sourced beans was truly a kind of java alchemy. Three solid months of flight time had to be logged by my trainee baristas before they could attempt even one perfect shot for a customer.

What my newbie baristas had to fully understand was the array of variables that could devolve the process; how their perfectly dosed and tamped pulls of sultry-sweet nectar, executed in the exact same manner, with the same equipment and coffee beans, could suddenly turn into acidy slipstreams of espresso hell. Only when the untried learned to get comfortable with confusion, friendly with frustration, would the one-true-God shot be within reach...

As Tucker worked on pulling my taste test, I peered over the blueberry marble counter. Our tables were half empty, a normal pattern for a late weekday morning. The occupied seats were recognizable regulars — NYU students with open text books, neighborhood freelancers with open laptops, and a few hospital workers on open cell phones.

Tucker’s morning backup, Esther Best (shortened from Bestovasky by her grandfather), appeared to be chatting with a small group of fans. (Yes, I said fans. Esther may have been one of my strongest latte artists, but her true renown as a local slam poetess had spread through at least two of the five boroughs. New customers, mostly aspiring “urban poets” and rappers, were showing up every day just to talk to her. Lucky for our bottom line they ordered coffee drinks from her, too.)

I finished scanning the room.

No sign of Matt yet.

After hearing his frantic message, I’d speed-dialed the man. All I got was voicemail (no surprise). So after my shower, I pulled on jeans and a Henley the color of toasted coconut and descended the stairs. I wasn’t scheduled for another hour, but Matt would be bursting in here any minute, and I theorized he’d be more likely to stay calm in a public place.

As the high morning sun broke through the low clouds, it made me feel calmer. The dazzling rays gleamed in the sparkling glass of our shop’s French doors. The restored wood-plank floor was all waxed and shiny; the twenty marble-topped tables stood reliably in place.

With new eyes, I gazed at the wrought-iron spiral staircase, soaring like a modern sculpture up to the second floor seating area where my tiny office waited with its shabby familiarity of battered desk and nonswiveling swivel chair.

Not even the relentlessly temperamental espresso-making process, the loudly squeaking back door, or our dangerously low supply of whole milk could shake my (guilty) feeling of thankfulness that it was Caffè Lucia and not my beloved Blend that had gone up in smoke.

“So, anyway, I didn’t know what my agent was thinking...”

I glanced back to Tucker, who had spoken again but not to me. He was in the middle of a conversation with Barry.

Like many of our regulars, Barry, a sweet doughboy of a guy with a receding hairline and soft brown eyes, was a free-lancer who worked from home and used the Blend as a way to mingle with humanity — or escape from it. Sometimes he brought his laptop, sometimes a paperback; other times, like today, he felt chatty and pulled up a barstool.

“Wait — you mean you don’t like the new job?” Barry asked between sips of his latte.

“Well, now I like the job. But when she told me about it, I said, ‘Honey, the stage is the thing for me — ’”

“What about that soap you did last year?” Esther interjected from across the room.

“Nobody calls them soaps, anymore,” Tucker replied. “It’s daytime drama.”

Esther propped a hand on her ample hip. “Well, whatever you want to call it, that was not a ‘stage’ job!”

Tucker smirked. “You never heard the term soundstage?”

“Repeat after me, Broadway Boy: As the Stomach Turns ain’t Masterpiece Theatre.”

“Just ignore the Dark Princess,” Tucker told Barry, making an insect-shooing motion with his hand.

Esther finally noticed me standing behind the work counter. She lifted her chin. “Oh, hi, boss.”

“Hi, Esther.”

Tucker had already preheated the portafilter (a required step for maintaining temperature during slow periods). He dosed and leveled off the proper amount of grinds and expertly packed them down with his personal purple tamper. Once more he tempered the group head with a quick flush of water. Then he locked the handle into the machine, positioned a clean shot glass, and hit the go button.

I closely watched the twenty-five-second extraction process. As I teach all of my employees, a barista does not have to taste a shot to know when it’s gone bad. The speed of extraction, visual viscosity of the liquor, even the color, are clear indicators of quality.

A full-flavored extraction, for example, has the texture of dripping honey; the color of a deep reddish-brown ale. An espresso with a thinner body and a light golden color might be prettier to look at in the cup, but it was completely sour on the tongue — not unlike Lucia Testa.

Hmmm...

Conversely black streaks in the crema meant there would be a level of bitterness at midtongue.

More of a Mrs. Quadrelli experience...

Okay, so I had Rossi’s case on the brain. What can I say? Finding solutions to puzzling problems intrigued me, and the puzzle of bad espresso was something I’d already mastered, to wit —

In case number one (the light golden color), there were two possible culprits: either the grind was too coarse or the brewing water not hot enough. In case number two (the black streaks), the grind was either too fine or the water too hot.

Solving bad espresso was usually a matter of testing new grinds and new water temperatures. The irony did not escape me. When it came to finding out who had torched Enzo’s caffè, Rossi would have to test the waters, too...

“Anyway,” Tucker went on, “I told my agent: ‘I will act the lines, I will write the lines, but I draw the line at radio announcing. Then she explained that it wasn’t radio announcing. This ad agency was looking for ‘character’ voices to do a series of PSAs — ”

“PSAs?” Barry said.

“You’re doing PSAs?” Esther asked.

Tucker deadpanned to Barry. “Didn’t I just say that?”

Her interest clearly piqued, Esther moved with all speed to join Tucker behind the work counter. “You have any ‘ins’ at the radio stations?”

“No.”

“Boris has a new YouTube upload ready to go. It’s called Strangers on a Train. He’s looking to get some airplay.” (Boris was Boris Bokunin, aka BB Gunn, assistant baker by day, urban rapper by