Zondar! Nerds in Food Land

Crossing Wynyard park on the search for another cafe we came across this…

A cafe for a day, without walking inside i was trying to work out what it was for which company? There was no branding on the outside… What were they hiding? Eventually ‘Nescafe’ I found in small print on one of the outside panels.

Ultra cafe styling on the outside brought on anticipation for Nescafe to come up with some new espresso bean blend. That didn’t happen. They were pimping a ‘new’ range of instant coffee, Nescafe baristas stood at a hotwater tap, ripped the end off piles of instant coffee sachets and whipped up the instant of your choice. I forced myself through halfway of my ’strong cappuccino’ and chucked it.

Today “Atlassian” is having a team building event “Cutlassian” the team tipped to win is “ragged arsed rovers”.

The best motivation for work has to be doing something you love. My brother works at Atlassian where they take a Google approach to the work environment. The lucky web workers have a team building event every quarter and spend the day running around the city collecting photos with strange landmarks, searching for trinkets and lining up friends for favours like getting posted on blogs, all in the name of team building. Don’t think they have an espresso machine in the office yet although they do have a music room with guitars and amps all set up for a lunchtime jam.

“This industry is booming” poured out of all the alleyways in The Rocks for the 2007 Aroma Festival. Even though a variety of complimentary products were also on display (chocolate, tea, incense) coffee was the ruler.

Toby’s Estate attracted the longest queues, punters waited up to 20 minutes for the $1 festival brew. Our Toby’s soy picolos brought on the second biggest ‘mmm yum’ grin of approval. However when Republica’s organic Timor blend hit thy lips ‘mmm yum’ became ‘oooh yeah…’ the only sip of the day that struck our taste buds with something different; a full, rich and deliciously earthy flavour.

The overseas passenger terminal became a home espresso paradise for the masses, dozens of glamorous touch-button machines with equally slick sales people, some priced at several thousand dollars. If the number of espresso machine tyre-kickers is any measure of the health of the economy, these may well be boom times. They say Ferrari sales are up.

Is there another cheap gst free staple that punters are willing fork out thousands of dollars for? German espresso machine manufacturer Krups’ (caution: website features excessive zooming on kitchen engineering devices!) slogan sums it up nicely ‘Beyond Reason’…

Interesting banter followed Georges Sabados’ rant on Coffee Geek. Alan Frew from coffeeco posted “More DOMESTIC espresso machines are sold and owned per capita in Australia than in any other country in the world ”

Apparently all those people with cardigans, ironed jeans and neat hair, along with their zooming Krups “get hands on training, gratis, on how to use their machine and how to understand the process that goes into making espresso. ” (CoffeeKid)

Apparently Ruben from Mecca got second in the latte art competition… Who was first?