Artisan Ethos

Further to the provocative statement on vegan ethics here, we have chosen this as a follow up to highlight this new publication’s value–on a subject we actually talk about in our office and a our resort operations:

Joy in the task

Even the finest restaurants are serving coffee made with capsules. Have we lost faith in the human touch?

 …You might not care much about fine dining or coffee. But you probably do value the skills of the artisan and might well believe that food is one of the ever-dwindling number of domains where individual human flair and creativity cannot be bettered by the mass-produced and mechanised. If so, you should care about the challenge to your assumptions that the rise of capsule coffee represents.

That concern lead me to a private dining room at the two Michelin-starred Latymer restaurant, part of the Pennyhill Park country house hotel in Surrey. With me were a coffee shop owner, two coffee obsessives, and a coffee-drinking friend. We were going to blind-taste three coffees: Nespresso capsule coffee, which is served in the restaurant; the traditional espresso that the hotel provides for room service; and a third unmarked coffee I had brought with me to be made the same way, just to see if the whole thing was nonsense and coffee is coffee is coffee. It was the artisan versus the machine, and given how top chefs had already voted with their contracts, the odds were against the result I instinctively preferred…

To read the whole story click on the banner image above.

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