
i have had some truly fantastic coffee in london so far. favorites have been tina, we salute you and taste of bitter love, which apparently both source beans from square mile coffee. this place roasts beans in our postal code, E2. WHAT UP, HACKNEY!!
speaking of hackney pride, who else loves hackney? PRINCE CHARLES AND CAMILLA DO. my friends seth, becky, and i tried to go next door to frizzante at hackney city farms for coffee and breakfast today, but we got upstaged by a visit from the royal family. sheesh. we saw a dude in a suit and some serious gold bling around his neck walk into the cafe (like massive official medal style, not flavor flav style) and asked what was going on. the policemen in their funny hats wouldn’t tell us who exactly was there, but said all the hubbub was for a royal visit from someone who is very ‘new age.’ seth happened to know that the prince of wales is doing cool stuff with farming and slow food, which i’m excited to learn more about. then another cop didn’t actually ‘confirm’ that it was prince charles, but…sort of did. if this were the US we probably would have gotten our asses beat down by secret service already. anyway, turned away from coffee on a farm with the prince, we went to bitter love instead and had an awesome warm and caramelly mascarpone apricot tart and drowned our sorrows in a perfect flat white.
in case you’re wondering where i learned about square mile and locally roasted coffee beans, it’s because i met GWILYM! yes, gwilym of world barista champion fame, who turns out to be a very nice man and not a white-robed resident of middle earth. oh and as if he couldn’t be more awesome, he lives on a boat. we chatted coffee and london for a while at his cart at the truly wonderful sunday columbia road flower market. more about that later. for now, you can just see in the top photo where i had a very good espresso on the left and a very good bacon butty on the right. talk about a one stop shop.
it’s time to leave the bar where we’ve been poaching free wi-fi (and i ate an awesome pork belly, crunchy black pudding and poached egg ’salad’) but i’ll leave you with this awesome animal latte art since we’ve been talking coffee. i may be a huge nerd, but i was riveted for the whole 3 minutes and 51 seconds.
loooooove mei
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wbg0YHpLlmQ&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0&border=1]