Tuesday’s WSJ has a long article about the many benefits of drinking coffee and the smaller number of possible drawbacks. The article takes pains to qualify each and every claim. And next month Jane Brody of the New York Times will fire back with a longer article about all the bad things that might be associated with drinking coffee.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703278604574624032849271284.html

Right now it is possible to think that drinking coffee may prevent diabetes, cancer of the prostate, and Alzeimher’s. If you drank a lot of coffee and ate a lot of kimchi you just might live forever.

On a very cold December day, far from Harvard Square, on an otherwise nondescript stretch of Mass. Avenue i wanderd into the tiny lab/showroom/stadup coffee bar of Barismo to fiind the plcce filled with young hipster tourists from all over the US and a few from East Asia. There was enough warmth from the crowd to steam the windows. I found a familiar face and asked, “What is going on?” She said, “I don’t know. They’re tourists and sometimes they arrive in groups.

They come because Barismo may be the moment’s cool coffee company. Barismo is picky about beans and they roast in small batches using two customized roasters from Taiwan. And at 169 Mass. Ave in Arlington, across from Bob Sargent’s Flora restaurant, they play, sort of like the Dead End Kids’ who once had their own basement clubhouse in the movies of the 1930’s. Huntz Hall, Leo Gorcey, Billy Halop. They hang out with each other and pull nearly perfect shots, and they use Japanese brewing equipment to make cups of coffee that may be even better. While I was l listening to visitors describe where they came from, and admiring the fashionable furry head gear of two Japanese girls the barista lowered his head and concentreated while he prepared a single-origin espresso shot that truly tasted fruity and wine-like. And then using an eccentric Japanese glass siphon the same barista made me the best mild cup of coffee I’ve ever had. Four of the barismaniacs gathered around to counsel patience while the coffee cooled and be supportive as fruit notes emerged and changed.

Coffe tourists can be divided into two groups, those that travel “to origin,” or countries that produce coffee, and those that visit cafes that offer great coffee, or cities that have clusters of famous cafes. New York City was once a terrible city for good coffee but now there are a half dozen excellent coffee companies. None of them selling coffee in the distinctive paper cup livery of the city’s Greek diners. Portland, Oregon and Seattle, Washington and British Columbia are a kind of cinqueterra for cofee heads. Italy and Vienna have cafes that lure older customers but the hard core coffee hipster is more likely to head for Scandinavia. And this banal strip of Massachusetts Avenue in Arlington, Mass.

When a friend attended graduate school in New Haven there was a controversy after someone changed ( or DEFACED!) a recycling sign for “colored paper.” They wrote “Paper of Color.” Now there is a collegetown tempest about a remark made by F. Scott Fitzgerald, “I have always thought of all Harvard men as sissies.” Everyone who remembers Maxfield Perkins knows that Fitzgerald went to Princeton and very few of those people care about any of this.

http://www.yaledailynews.com/crosscampus/2009/12/23/scrapped-fcc-shirts-draw-ire-civil-rights-group/

http://www.jesseashlock.com/id-magazine-1954-2009

I know a lot of people who love to read I-D magazine but apparently I know the wrong kind of people or not enough people. They’re closing the magazine. You miss magazines that die like you miss friends who move to Ohio. I miss Look, which now has a photography retrospective at a museum in New York, the old Ramparts and the old Crawdaddy, Fusion, Boston’s alternative to Rolling Stone, even the bizarre American Spectator.

Global Post is the website for international news that newspapers no longer print. They have a story about how bad coffee is in colombia. Colombia prduces a lot of good coffee but if you want a good cup to drink you should go to Finland, which produces no coffee but great cloudberries.

http://www.globalpost.com/print/5235297

Years ago I was making ice cream on a snowy Christmas Eve. I had planned to make ice cream during the day but couldn’t do so because a worker had dumped his shift to meet a girlfriend in New York. So I was unhappily working away behind our plate glass windows looking at the Shell station that once dominated our intersection. The temperature had dropped enough for a fine snow powder to cover the sidewalk and asphalt roadway. A big car pulled to a stop and I saw that the driver was the old-fashioned gangster who worked a a bouncer for the massage parlor that used to be located beneath Toscanini’s. So much has changed. He was with a disagreeable-looking woman I had never seen before. Not one of the daytime girls from community college or one of the harder night-time girls. She waied in the car while he left the motor running. He stood next to the car and adjusted his camel hair coat the way Marlon Brando would have in Guys and Dolls or Sheldon Leonard would have in any of a dozen black and white films.
Without knocking he pulled the door open and came in to the ice cream making area, “What the hell are you doing here on Christmas Eve?” he said.

The new issue of Harvard magazine has an enthusiatic review of Tupelo, Inman Square’s Southern food mecca. http://harvardmagazine.com/2010/01/tupelo-restaurant-review There’s a radiant photo of starchef Rembs Layman but no mention of the Tupelo Honey they helped us develop for their opening. Tupelo, Mississippi was the birthplace of Elvis Presley, Tupelo Honey was probably Van Morrison’s second best album, and the honey made by bees from the blossoms of the tupelo tree is special. Tupelo the rrestaurant supplied us with some of this special stuff and we mad a disrinctive Tupelo Honey ice cream for the restaurant’s opening. Tupelo the restaurant was also the location for Dr. Mario De Caro’s introduction to Louisiana cooking. The food prompted much philosophical brooding on the influence of climate on culture and the importance of pleasure.

The Food Doc reports on new soft serve flavors from downtown NYC uber-hipster David Chang.
http://thefooddocu.blogspot.com/2009/12/new-soft-serve-flavors-at-momofuku.html
He’s making mocha and candy cane. “Sacre bleu” as Major Andre would have once remarked in Blackhawk comics. In Downtown Farmington, Maine, Gifford’s also makes candy cane. So do we. The very authoritative Ice Cream Reporter also notes that Gifford’s has won, for the second time in three years, “World’s Best Chocolate ice cream” at the World Dairy Expo. This is a shock to us, David Chang of Momofuku, and that Pierre Herme guy in France.

You may remember the story about the first Haagn-Dazs store in India and its refusal to let in Indian customers without a foreign passport. Maybe they were lucky because the Ice Cream Reporter notes that a half liter, or about a pint, costs $13.50 or 625 rupees. A pint at my neighborhood Store 24, staffed by Pakistanis who ask for proof age when buying cigarettes but let me in without my passport, costs less than $5. I’ll try to get a price conversion.

Nation’s Restaurnt News reports that the lovble Steak n Shake Corporation is now the highest pricer restaurant stock in the US. After a 1 for 20 reverse stock split indivisual shares closed at $293. A little of what is interesting about Steak n Shake is that it is part of Danny Meyer’s idea for his aborning Shake Shack chain. Meyer was raised in Saint Louis and combined Steak n Shake with local ice ream giant, Ted Drewes. Then he added a Chicago hot dog to the menu, and ibrought to bear his usual attention to detail and commitment to customer service. Voila. The NYTimes writes long breathless pieces about your company. There is a chance that a Shake Shack will locate near the Bosrton Common Frog Pond, but the city still has a chance to screw that up. Maybe instead they can get the lemonade truck from the public Garden.

Read more: http://www.nrn.com/breakingNews.aspx?id=377208&utm_source=MagnetMail&utm_medium=email&utm_term=gus@tosci.com&utm_content=NRN-News-NRNam-12-22-09&utm_campaign=Dec.%2022,%202009%20-%20Steak%20n%20Shake%20is%20industry%27s%20most%20expensive%20stock#ixzz0aRrjHjMf

On Christmas Eve, Th, De 24, we will be open from 8A>4PM.

On Christmas Day, Fr, De 25, we will be closed. Let’s meet in Chinatown for noodles. Maybe a movie.

NO BREAKFAST@THEBIG TABLE ON HOLIDAY WEEKENDS

On New Year’s Eve, Th De 31 we will sell Champagne Sorbet from 8AM>4PM.

On New Year’s Day, Fr Ja 1 we will be closed

NO BREAKFAST@THEBIG TABLE ON HOLIDAY WEEKENDS