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2010-03-20
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This café is now my second favorite café in Hong Kong after visiting the place for three times over the weekend and one more time today. As others here said, the barista is knowledgeable in coffee and used to operate/own a café in Sydney before deciding to move back Hong Kong. He’s quite flexible in both talking coffee and greeting customer like a good host, giving one a sense of good neighborhood coffee shop with a kick, IMHO. While this sounds very mundane, I found most good cafés in Hong K
As others here said, the barista is knowledgeable in coffee and used to operate/own a café in Sydney before deciding to move back Hong Kong. He’s quite flexible in both talking coffee and greeting customer like a good host, giving one a sense of good neighborhood coffee shop with a kick, IMHO. While this sounds very mundane, I found most good cafés in Hong Kong only did one thing very well and significantly lag in the other so much so that I always thought the combination never works here in Hong Kong. So, this is actually a gem.
Why barista “jam”? Because you can try pulling the espresso shot and froth milk by yourself with its second espresso machine, Orchestral, and the Taiwan made grinder 900 series which looks similar to super jolly. The main espresso machine is La Marzocco GB5 with two re-badged Super Jolly, I believe.
Talking about the machine, Barista Jam did consider the famous Synesso two groups but dropped the idea. Part of it is that there was no distributor in HK at the time. Our huge loss, indeed. As an aside, this great machine with rock solid temperature and superb cup clarity has its own reseller in HK at hkcoffee.com. I wish some café who really knows what they are doing consider this Synesso for the sake of themselves (durable) and ourselves (great cup clarity). I’m waiting…
Back to Barista Jam. Unsurprisingly, both Barista Jam and Coco Espresso, another good café in the same neighborhood, have lots of similarity. For one, they were from Sydney, Australia so you kinda can put some finger on them due to a significant exposure to good coffee in that part of the world. Also, the taste profiles of their coffee are very similar I couldn’t help thinking of the other café when I had coffee at one of them, ie somewhat more pronounced in acidity but milder overall taste. William, the barista at Barista Jam, blends Brazil, Colombia and Ethiopian beans by himself for his “house” blend while the blend at Coco has one more source of bean from Sumatra. The acidity of Barista Jam’s house blend complement greatly with its cappuccino like what I read about how Sydney’s coffee should taste like. To this end, I prefer a more velvety texture and somewhat sweet frothed milk at Barista Jam to that of Coco though the difference was not that much.
Ristretto from Dane’s Caribbean blend, an imported coffee bean from Australia, was too subdued, reminding me of but no match to the subtlety of Chicago famous Intelligentsia’s Black Cat blend. This Caribbean blend is, in the barista’s word, a “lady” coffee and, according to him, typical for Sydney’s coffee. I didn’t like it that much and I doubt about its freshness; William indicated he will not accept coffee more than three weeks from the roast date.
Ristretto from its locally roasted blend which was also used in its capp was much better. Still, both shared the same problem, IMHO, i.e. no syrupy consistency I can easily find at Crema Coffee, hkcoffee.com (local custom roaster – not café though) and, at time, Café Corridor. Again, the coffee kinda reminds me of Coco Espresso but more forward on every front which I like. This blends was at that time 2 weeks after roasting vs. Barista Jam’s suggested sweet spot of three weeks.
Barista Jam also served filtered coffee and I had Peru FTO French press. The coffee was quite clean and, at the hint of its barista, had some fainted strawberry flavor. Nevertheless, it was so bored and dull. Not that the coffee was really bad; I also experience the same tasting note from Peruvian coffee carried by Glory Coffee, another Sydney based coffee people, a while back. Blame it on my taste then.
Another coffee I had is Piccolo latte which is more expensive than capp and actually a more condensed version of this kind of drink, ie much less milk vs. coffee. It was supposed to wow me but I didn’t feel much. In fact, I prefer my cappuccino much more. So, try it if you want less volume for your drink.
Its cake/pastry offering was very similar to Felix's Cafe Corridor I think they actually come from the same place. The pasta and its breakfast were OK, just like you had it at your friend house though I preferred foods from Café Corridor much more.
This would have concluded my note; however, it gets better.
I dropped by last Saturday morning and, kudo to Boris, another fellow coffee lover, for Square Mile's Winter Espresso blend. You can look up the tasting note and the background of James Hoffman and Square Mile on the web. Simply put, he’s one of the best coffee guys at the moment. I had two of so-called test shots of this blends. Boy, one of the best I ever had. Tons of marmalade jam flavor in the cups, indicating that William, the barista, is capable of pulling a god shot. If I remember correctly, I see some tiger speck in one of the cups, a sign of great espresso pull.
I had another shot of winter espresso today. While the taste was more rounded as the coffee aged/rested and the marmalade note was still there, I kinda missed a more forward balance of the taste I had when the bean was fresher last week. In fact, the nut/peanut aftertaste was now much more prominent and, just for me, I don’t like this taste in my cup. Mind you that Barista Jam followed James Hoffman’s guideline on resting the coffee a while and up-dose the coffee, making this special espresso pricier than its regular offering. However, it’s worth it. William plans to have this kind of ‘special’ espresso from renowned blends he picks from around the world in the future, a great idea for us coffee lover indeed.
Decoration wise, this one is sort of minimalist in its style and quite comfortable to sit though I prefer the homey feel of Coco Espresso much more.
In all, I like this café a lot, particularly the energy of the owner/operator. As the café is quite new, around 1-2 months in operation, I can only hope he can keep up the level of creativity, energy and enthusiasm easily shown to his clients and me on my visits there. I would suggest you to drop by this café sooner than later and highly recommend you try his special espresso offering.
张贴
