
Even fine restaurants serve coffee made with capsules - jseliger
http://aeon.co/magazine/being-human/julian-baggini-coffee-artisans/
======
jerf
I find it sort of ironic for this sort of thing to show up on a computer
programming site, because our world has long since discovered that automating
_itself_ becomes a skill. Even if we hypothesize a world in which the top-
level restaurants are fully automated behind the scenes, it will still be
master chefs that come up with the new programs, new foods, new ways of doing
things, and commanding dizzying new heights of pricing in the process.

The absolute worst case scenario is that the culinary world becomes like the
visual arts or fashion worlds; the materials and general skills are broadly
available, but there shall ever be an upper end of the art from which to sneer
down at the plebians, even if it only in style and fashions, and by that I
mean _raw_ styles and fashions. The clothing fashion world shows this most
clearly, in that creating knockoffs of today's fashions isn't even that
technically challenging, and yet there is still a "high class" fashion world
for those who care to participate in.

The instinctive human drive to differentiate is what creates that, the upper
class attitude is what creates that, the incidental details of how one
particular field happens to signal is hardly relevant, the actual details are
themselves nearly infinitely malleable.

The programming world is so many levels deep into automation of automation of
automation that we've nearly forgotten the promises that one day we'd be
automated out of existence. But the promises were made, and they failed,
because we merely upped our expectations and advanced to the next level.
Perhaps someday there won't be a "next level" for us to rise to, but that is a
world so different from ours we can no longer predict what it is like.

The culinary world will adapt. There will be much moaning, must wringing of
hands, and a _hell_ of a lot of signaling _words_ flying around about how
wonderful hand crafted artisan food is (even if for some reason, every day,
fewer people _act_ to consume it), even as there is ever and always still an
elite, which will probably consist of mostly the same people anyhow.

~~~
cookingrobot
I think about this a lot. There's something fundamentally lacking in the way
we cook and share cooking, that other arts have already solved.

When a musician creates music, they can record and share it with anyone who
cares. Writers print books, actors make movies, coders make apps.

With cooking, we're still stuck in the live performance era. In a restaurant
you can eat what the chef prepares and enjoy their art. But if you can't get
to the restaurant or can't afford it you miss out. Famous chefs release
cookbooks and film cooking shows where they let you watch them and you can try
to recreate their craft for yourself, but that's not really sharing the food.

The problem is there is no food media. An actual dish can't be recorded,
transmitted, and reproduced, and so we rely on storytelling about the food
using other methods. Food is the subject but not the substance.

We've been here before, and we've moved beyond this before. The mass media of
writing started with monks transcribing text, but then was improved by the
printing press. Writing let us describe music on sheets that you could
reproduce by hand at home, but the media of music really started with the wax
cylinder, then the phonograph and radio. I think food will become the next
major art to become a medium.

~~~
jckt
I disagree. I believe this actually puts food farther away from the common
man, more esoteric than it really has to. Food is fundamentally different from
the arts you mentioned. Some people may facetiously say that they can't live
without visual arts, or music. To say you cannot live without food -- that is
a true statement. Programming, painting, writing -- we only started doing
these things relatively recently in terms of our full history, and were some
near-extinction event to happen in the future (distant, but an absolute
certainty), it is possible we may stop doing them in the future. But we will
always be eating and drinking.

I can tell you that food can indeed be "recorded, transmitted, and reproduced"
\-- we do it by doing the cooking ourselves, learning from recipes and our
imagination. Why should food be so hard? That it's considered an extraordinary
feat to cook a wonderful dinner? Why should it be on par with painting a
painting or writing a book? I assure you that if you ask any honest cook or
chef, they will tell you that cooking isn't difficult. Their job is fucking
hard, but the cooking itself? As simple as arts can go.

The upper limit of cooking has, admittedly, increased. This is a recent
phenomenon. In the future, this may become easier as certain technologies
become democratised, and the avant-garde again becomes the status quo. We saw
this with Escoffier, Bocuse. We will see it again with Adria. A competent home
cook will not miss out on the _food_ of any great restaurant (bar the cutting
edge, maybe?) as long as he/she is willing to learn a few tricks (with the
restaurant book craze, there are no more secrets) and pay a bit more for
groceries (thanks, globalisation).

I hope I don't sound too hostile. I didn't downvote you either (hah, don't
even have the choice to). I just think that you're looking at food from too
academic a viewpoint -- too high up. That's not to say that food cannot reach
greater heights. But not in the way you predict or wish it to.

Of course, I do hope you visit more great restaurants. Having worked in the
back of house of said restaurants, I do want your business! The _experience_
of a restaurant transcends its food, and the unique whole package is of
course, not replicable anywhere but in that restaurant. Would there be
"restaurant media"? I don't know -- restaurant documentaries don't cut it,
maybe the VR headsets we were promised a decade ago would be the solution?

Somehow I think that actually going to the restaurant is, in the end, the only
way to do it.

(Whether or not the concept of restaurant will survive into the far future is
another debate)

~~~
mark371
> Food is fundamentally different from the arts you mentioned. Some people may
> facetiously say that they can't live without visual arts, or music. To say
> you cannot live without food -- that is a true statement.

I fail to see the difference.

Nutrition is a solved problem. Just drink soylent.

So we are left to talk about the art side of food - taste, smell, feel, touch,
look. Artistic composition of ingredients to create a pleasurable meal.

> A competent home cook will not miss out on the food of any great restaurant
> (bar the cutting edge, maybe?) as long as he/she is willing to learn a few
> tricks (with the restaurant book craze, there are no more secrets) and pay a
> bit more for groceries (thanks, globalisation).

But it's hard to reproduce food from recipe. We need:

\- better frozen/packaged foods

\- detailed recipes

\- food 3d printers?

~~~
wakeless
Checkout the device called a Thermomix. It essentially cooks, prepares, does
everything except buy and measure the ingredients.

~~~
jckt
Haha it does cost quite a lot though...I've only ever seen them in
professional kitchens.

------
toyg
I'm not surprised. As a coffee-drinking Italian, I personally think Nespresso
is really good at what it does: it delivers, time after time, a great coffee
with no effort whatsoever. You'll have to find a really good barista using
really good equipment and really good coffee to beat it. It's the pinnacle of
decades of evolutionary experiments from one of the richest companies on
Earth, fine-tuning what is, like the article says, a relatively simple
process; when you look at it that way, it's not surprising that it works so
well.

This said, their business model is very much anti-consumer: they're doing with
coffee what HP and Epson did with ink. For this reason alone, I never bought a
Nespresso and I'll stick to brewing my own coffee. As the article says, it's
not just about measuring, not even _measuring quality_ : it's about the kind
of world we want to build.

~~~
fennecfoxen
Nespresso machines also can't make pretty latte art... though I don't know
whether that's legit-Italian or just third-wave-American :)

~~~
rubiquity
You lost me at latte and then killed me at Latte art. Coffee bombed with milk
isn't coffee.

~~~
vacri
_" Music snobbery is the worst kind of snobbery. ‘Oh, you like those noises,
those sounds, in your ear? Do you like them? They’re the wrong sounds. You
should like these sounds’" \- Dara O'Briain_

s/music/coffee

~~~
Alphasite_
Huh, I have to say I'm surprised to see this here, he's a comedian who I
haven't seen referenced on the internet before.

------
devindotcom
Sure, the coffee is fine. The question is one of control for me, not of
quality. I like old-school "analog" coffee like my simple pourover or stovetop
espresso machine because they are simple devices and, properly maintained,
will make coffee forever. A capsule coffee machine is complex, the capsules
can't be made by you (and some are triple-packaged, leading to lots of waste),
they require power and microprocessors, and so on.

I choose the simpler method not because the coffee is better (though I'm sure
it can be, and many factors are at play here), but because, in a way, it's the
FOSS alternative to the bloated, proprietary capsule systems.

~~~
sitharus
At home I have a NZ$150 single-boiler espresso machine and a $80 conical burr
grinder. I buy 50g bags of coffee for $10 from the local coffee roaster, which
works out to around $0.50 per coffee, around half the price of the nespresso
pods.

It all works rather well.

~~~
jmackinn
Sorry, did you say you pay $10 for a 50g bag of coffee?

~~~
monkeyspaw
Must be a typo. Can't get 20 coffees from 50g. My guess would be that it
should be 500g.

------
cpt1138
I found this app called Acceptable Espresso. A bunch of coffee nuts in SF go
around and test only espresso and if its consistently "acceptable" they put it
in the app. I have tried a bunch of what they deem acceptable and its some of
the best espresso I have had in the world.

Now to me there are several aspects to this. One clear factor is whether the
barista "cares" about the coffee they are giving me. Clay at Special X-tra is
so damn good at pulling a perfect shot every single time and Chris just
doesn't care and pulls a mediocre shot at best. Everywhere I go where the
barista "cares" about pulling that shot the espresso is "acceptable."

I don't judge on characteristics of the beans/roast, I know some like acid,
some like smooth. If the coffee is fresh, not burned, ground properly, tamped
properly (an artform) and pulled properly and with care, I am going to like it
most likely.

In terms of the Nespresso system, what you've done is remove the possibility
of someone caring about the coffee they are serving me. I've tried espresso's
from the Nespresso system and they are not even close to what I can get at
Elite Audio, Special Xtra (make sure Clay does it), Vega, Blue Bottle (more of
scene than I usually like), Cento, or Jackson Place. Its reliably very
mediocre at best. The least acceptable espresso I've had is at Coffee Bar,
where they roast a little too dark for my tastes, and even those, as long as I
tell them to pull it short, are much better than a Nespresso system shot.

~~~
Goopplesoft
"Caring" doesn't mean much in the context of a blind coffee taste test, nor
does it mean much in the context of good things. Caring to make something good
and having the ability to do so are completely separate things.

~~~
Mikeb85
When it comes to various kinds of food preparation, 'caring' is basically the
ability to care enough to learn the required skills. While it's true that the
barrista doesn't need to care about you on that day to pull a good shot, they
have to care enough about coffee to learn the skills required to pull a good
shot.

------
sanoli
tl;dr: Huge number of fine restaurants serve Nespresso-capsule coffee. They
are more consistent than barista-made coffee; the whole process is controlled,
and even came out ahead in blind tests. Author however still argues that there
is a place for the artisan and the handmade. Author didn't give the win to
Nespresso on the blind test -- yet author actually saw which coffee was in
each cup. Author actually rendered rendered his score in said blind test
useless.

~~~
wila
You forgot to mention that author based his article around a test with 4
subjects. Eg. statistic results based on a sample size of 4.

I think we do not even have to debate the quality of the coffee used in the
tests and that the coffee the author brought from home was ground 4 days
earlier.

------
badman_ting
There is a lot going on here. All I can say is that I'm not sure El Bulli is a
good example of the human touch being lost. The amount of manpower that went
into their meals was insane. I'm sure Adria said something about functioning
like machines, but in the event that meant huge amounts of practice, crazy
attention to detail, tons of trial and error, endless painstaking
documentation, etc. Hard work, but creative work. Watch "Cooking in Progress"
if you're interested in the details (a bit dry in my opinion).

------
plorkyeran
Even if Nespresso was significantly worse than it is, I wouldn't be surprised
by an otherwise good restaurant using it, simply because I don't expect good
food to correlate to good coffee. Getting coffee or tea that's any better than
merely drinkable is quite uncommon in my experience regardless of the quality
of the food. I assume it's different in countries where some espresso after
(or before) a meal is more common, though.

~~~
djur
I would expect even good restaurants to have just okay coffee, not as good as
the average cafe, unless we're talking an excellent breakfast place. In the
US, people have coffee with breakfast and with dessert. So a dinner restaurant
isn't going to serve a lot of cups of coffee -- just to a subset of people who
choose to have dessert.

And although good coffee is always welcome, you don't really need a great
coffee with dessert, just a decent one. You want something to perk your senses
up a bit after the meal and to provide heat and bitterness to balance out the
sweet, probably cold dessert. Nobody's going to be focusing on the coffee,
just the dessert. And people don't expect to pay more than a few bucks for a
cup of coffee, even at a nice place.

So there's really not much profit in stocking great coffee, installing top-of-
the-line coffee machines, and training your staff how to make it. Making
espresso is relatively time-consuming, too, as is grinding the beans and
cleaning everything (working as a barista is like 90% cleaning). So you buy
something that sounds impressive enough to list on the menu for as cheap as
you can get it, you grind up enough ahead of time to get you through the
night, you put it in a big industrial-sized drip machine with an insulated
carafe, and you forget about it.

~~~
toyg
_> Nobody's going to be focusing on the coffee, just the dessert._

I think that's actually a common misconception. Maybe it's relevant only in
coffee-heavy cultures, but a coffee is (often) _the very last thing one will
taste before leaving the restaurant_. You want your customers to leave on a
high note, right? This is why so much effort is spent on the dessert, the
final dish. But the coffee will _follow_ the dessert! _That 's_ the final
dish.

When an otherwise decent meal is followed by a terrible coffee, to me it's
depressing; it forces me to re-evaluate the experience. Maybe those dishes
weren't as good as I thought, maybe they got them right by accident... This is
why many restaurants will actually offer you liquor at the very end; it's an
easy way to make you leave happy. If you don't go down that route, then you
should invest some time in making sure the coffee is good. Or at least get a
Nespresso :)

~~~
djur
Well, I'm talking about the US, where I have always had coffee served with
dessert, not after it. And of course the coffee should be decent, even pretty
good. I'm just saying it doesn't make economic sense to serve great coffee
unless you're intending to focus on that as a restaurant.

~~~
saraid216
You're not really supposed to finish your coffee before you finish your
dessert. I mean, it's fine to, but the last thing you ingest at a restaurant
should be a beverage.

------
jcrites
The discussion about whether products are better when made by an artisan
reminds me of the essay called "What Colour are your bits?"

[http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php](http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php)

The article discusses how society treats information differently depending on
where it came from, and how it was produced -- even if that difference is not
observable in the raw bits themselves.

When we are discussing whether artisan-made products are better, I think it is
worthwhile to have in mind whether we're considering objective, measurable
standards, or a different sort of perspective that takes into account "color".
From the article:

> Of course, we need to think about yield, efficiency and environmental
> impact. But we also need to think about what kind of world we want to live
> in. And if we do, most of us would say that we would prefer food chains that
> preserve human links between consumer, farmer, land, and animals, in a
> landscape that combines functionality and beauty as much as is possible.

Is the concept of "preserving human links" something that can be measured
objectively, or is it color?

------
anigbrowl
Sadly, coffee capsules are about the most wasteful way imaginable to get your
caffeine fix, to the point that the inventor of the technology now says he's
sorry he came up with it: [http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/waste-the-
dark-side-of...](http://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/waste-the-dark-side-of-
the-new-coffee-craze/Content?oid=3687220&showFullText=true)

------
kunai
The Nespresso story brings up an important point, especially for everybody in
Silicon Valley.

Analog.

No, really, I'm serious. It really is about analog. For years and years,
everyone who has had any experience with technology has been striving to
create perfection and flawless beauty in every sense of the words. Digital is
the best way to do this – it's calculated, cold, and mathematical. It's
predictable and reassuring. But humans aren't digital. Our hands tremble; they
don't stay steady like a robot's mechanical arm. Our brains aren't perfect:
they often forget things we want to remember, and remember things we want to
forget. Our walking isn't straight. Many of us have less-than-flawless health
and vision. We're not completely symmetrical, and look pretty ugly without
clothing.

In other words, humans are imperfect.

But, perfection, while it is the antithesis to imperfection, is paradoxically
horrible for humans. Our brains are wired to expect change and differentiation
from the routine. We like good surprises, and monotony gets dull. Unlike a
computer, our neurons are always firing and active rather than passive, so we
hate passivity.

So, isn't perfection just the antithesis of everything that makes the world
beautiful? A lovely red leaf hanging on a tree long after the winter solstice.
The knotted wood on a piano. The fingerprints on a record. Isn't perfection
what takes the life out of life?

As we continue to automate, we really, seriously need to ask ourselves a
question: will we accept convenience for mediocrity?

Sadly, consumer choices and corporate brainwashing have shown in the past that
we will.

And that won't change in the future. Enjoy your handmade coffee now, because
it will get rarer and rarer in the future. And with every imperfect barista
replaced with a perfect machine, we'll lose a little bit of what makes
humans...

...humans.

~~~
nitrogen
Although your description of human imperfection is picturesque and I tend to
agree, I don't doubt that we can automate imperfection. I've given the subject
some thought recently since I just spent all of yesterday manually tweaking
note start and end times in a sequenced piano composition of mine to make it
sound more natural.

------
dreamfactory
This is a bit ridiculous. Nespresso is best described as not bad and not good
- it's drinkable in the same way as Starbucks. The technology is pretty
rudimentary and the machines don't have sufficient boilers to get a consistent
water temperature going through the coffee (tightly controlled water
temperature and freshness of the coffee are the two main variables for
flavour). The espresso they made in the test must have been pretty mediocre
not to trounce Nespresso. (The author's coffee was never going to win any
prizes - wrong beans, wrong grind, and 4 days old - a decent brew needs beans
ground within minutes at worst).

~~~
jseliger
_Nespresso is best described as not bad and not good_

Per the article, in this blind taste test, the opposite appears to be true:

 _In distant last place came the ground coffee I had brought, a very good
quality, single-estate bean, but not roasted for espresso and ground four days
earlier, a little too coarsely for Bruno’s machine. The traditional house
espresso scored 18 points, and was the favourite of one taster. But the clear
winner with 22 points was the Nespresso, which both scored most consistently
and was the favourite of two of the four tasters. Of course, these were just
four people’s opinions. But their consensus fits the judgment of top chefs and
Nespresso’s own extensive testing, which must have been conclusive enough for
them to have the confidence to agree to my challenge in the first place._

If you have better data, cite it!

~~~
dreamfactory
The point I was trying to make is that you could hardly assemble worse 'data'
if you tried. It's blatantly absurd from the coffee he used to test, and if
you have ever had both Nespresso and decent coffee (e.g. just about any coffee
shop in Portland) your tastebuds would need to be blind to consider Nespresso
as on a par.

My own informal testing (which would seem to have at least equal scientific
validity to the article) is based on friends and family A/B-ing my own decent
home machine, some excellent local coffee shops, Starbucks, and a Nespresso
machine I bought for a relative so that I could bear to drink their coffee
when I visited.

Not trying to grandstand here but the article has misleading info (and may
well be astroturf), that's all.

------
hyp0
My experience: I've tried nespresso and it's just not in the same league as
really excellent coffee. This is true for some surprising reasons.

Coffee from most specialist espresso cafes is really not that good. But some
are. I got the barista at one to teach me how she made coffee (Note: although
already experienced, she wasn't very good for the first year at that cafe, but
became extraordinary within 3 years).

The two things I learned were that (1). the grind is affected by the changing
humidity and temperature of the day, so must be adjusted (this is more
important for an espresso cafe, where the machine is near the entrance - in a
fancy hotel, it would be climate controlled); (2). the texture of the milk
froth (for a latte) is very important to the experience - when correct, you
can see the milk falling like snow through the coffee. There is no boundary
between coffee and milk, but a very gradual gradient (which disappears within
a few minutes). Although it _looks_ nice, the big difference is in the
incredible silky taste.

 _tl;dr_ grind and frothing automation

~~~
ojii
my experience is that if you're going for good, not excellent, coffee
nespresso is damn good. especially if you factor in time and effort.

------
stephen_g
I'm a bit confused at what this article is trying to prove.

I live in Australia, which surprisingly has some of the best coffee culture in
the world, but here you sort of just expect that all restaurants serve pretty
crap coffee. I would never, ever use it as a benchmark for good coffee...

In my city (third largest in the country), we have hundreds of little cafes
that either roast on-site or are supplied by local artesian roasters. The
quality of the product that many of these places are producing is pretty
incredible (to my taste at least), and I have never had a capsule coffee that
comes close...

~~~
code_duck
The real content of the article comes in the second half, after the coffee
discussion is over. I am tempted to comment on the coffee content as well,
though.

------
heydenberk
This is much more true in Europe than in the United States. Many trendy
restaurants in the US are actually getting less automatic by doing pour over
coffee at the table or otherwise in view of the diners.

------
jzzskijj
I realize the competition wasn't the main point of the article, but:

"In distant last place came the ground coffee I had brought, a very good
quality, single-estate bean, but not roasted for espresso and ground four days
earlier, a little too coarsely for Bruno’s machine."

Bringing not roasted for espresso coffee to espresso competition makes me
wonder what was the purpose of the competition. Why not to bring something
that had the characteristics of a winning coffee.

------
andrewcooke
technically, how can they make ground coffee in a pod comparable to freshly
ground coffee? even if you use an inert gas in the pod, aren't you going to
have chemical changes in the pod? and some loss (evaporation) of lighter
chemicals? it seems like if grinding freshly is important (and i have heard
many times that it is), then it's just not physically possible to reproduce
the taste via a pre-ground pod. odd.

~~~
dreamfactory
The gas works well at preserving the coffee from oxidation. The bigger problem
is with water temperature - espresso is incredibly sensitive and will become
either sour or bitter if the temperature goes outside a very narrow band. This
is what you are spending money on with expensive espresso machines - PID
temperature controls and lots of heavy brass parts to maintain an even heat.
Nespresso machines are pretty cheap and plastic and I believe they use
specially made bland coffee blends to disguise this.

Frankly you are better off with French press or pourover at home.

------
enra
Ordering coffee or tea in a restaurant is most of the time disappointing
anyway. Doesnt matter how fine or average the place is, they seen to use some
bulk coffee usually prepared with an industrial coffee maker (drip coffee, not
espresso drinks).

Restaurants take great care of lot other food and beverage details by for some
reason they cant use decent fresh coffee or tea.

------
damoe
Chess enthusiasts recently enjoyed two humans play in the World Chess
Championship even though the machine has conquered chess. I see no reason that
coffee lovers need give up the barista.

I have a Nespresso and have made my own Sous Vide cooker, but I'll throw
stakes on the BBQ at most dinner parties because of the social aspects.

------
adamconroy
I don't see an issue. The capsule coffee should be just as good and if its a
time saver then why wouldn't a business use them.

Personally I don't use a capsule machine because I don't want my coffee
choices limited by manufacturer. Also, instead of 25c per cup, capsules are
80-90c per cup.

------
yawz
I think people underestimate the importance of "consistency"! As a coffee
lover I value consistency a lot. Nespresso may not be "the best" coffee but it
offers a great taste/cost/practicality value.

------
shiven
Great to hear I drink the same coffee everyday that is served by Michelin
starred restaurants. _Viva la_ Nespresso!

------
lesinski
In order to pack coffee into air-tight pods like Nespresso does, the coffee
must first completely degas and become stale. What fine restaurant would serve
a stale dish? Regardless of consistency, taste, automation, etc?

------
kimonos
I really agree on this: "Humans are imperfect, and so a world of perfection
that denies the human element can never be truly perfect after all.".. Nice
post!

------
RuCrazy
how does this story pertain to hacker news....come again!?

~~~
toyg
Automation vs "handmade" is a very important topic for our geek world, and
very broad. This article signals that, even in something as human as making
coffee, automation is clearly winning. _And yet_ the author refuses to concede
the point (I'd do the same, although for different reasons).

It's important for anyone involved in creative industries to understand, in
their specific field, what can be automated today, what has already been
automated, and what _should not_ be automated. These are huge factors that
will affect your training, your output, your pricing, your marketing and your
future strategy, regardless of which field of endeavour you're in.

