June 2008 Archives

On an agricultural lark, Ilene and our little girl decided to put a dry garbanzo bean — you know, the kind you buy in bulk at Whole Foods — into a small cup filled with dirt.

They watered it. The bean sprouted. Eventually we moved it to a pot outside, and it grew a bit.

It flowered recently, and a few bean pods are now hanging off the plant.

Homegrown garbanzo beans in the San Fernando Valley — looks like it's going to happen.

Photo by Ilene, who's writing about what we eat at Foodspace.

We all gathered around the TV this morning to see the Daily News' own Greg Hernandez get a commendation from the L.A. City Council and plenty of praise at Los Angeles City Hall as part of the city's second annual LGBT Pride Month Celebration.

Greg was there with Daily News reporter Beth Barrett, managing editor Melissa Lalum and former editor and current muckraker Ron Kaye.

Councilman Bill Rosendahl praised Greg for his groundbreaking work on Out in Hollywood — one of our most popular blogs — as well as his relentless stream of features that run in the Daily News.

I don't watch a lot of council meetings. OK, I don't watch any. I don't have cable. But I was surprised to see them let Greg make a speech about what he does, the passion he brings to the job and how the Daily News gave him free reign to be an out gay journalist (did I phrase that right?) writing about what matters to him — and to others.

One of the things I like about Out in Hollywood is the personal tone that Greg uses. That lends a unique take to everything from revisiting entertainment legends to introducing the next generation of stars. And then there's all that gossip. It's a crowded field, gossip that is, but it adds an essential spice — and it doesn't hurt a bit that it's wildly popular.

Councilman Rosendahl spoke the truth when he said that Out in Hollywood has had over 2 million page views since its inception in June 2006. I can also tell you that the blog has been growing in popularity lately, and I think there's plenty of room for it to get even more popular.

And the way that Out in Hollywood feeds the print edition of the Daily News — mainly in the form of Greg's daily columns on Page 2 — is exactly the way all of this is supposed to work. In any news organization where there are print and online components, the information needs to flow both ways. Whatever we see online should influence, inform and shape what we see in print, and vice versa.

All of this is due to Greg's relentless pace. He is a journalism machine. And when it comes to things like blogging and tapping into the celebrity zeitgeist, he gets it — and is able to follow through with the work required — more than anybody I know.

He knows what readers want, and he delivers (even if it's celebrity beefcake, but we'll leave that discussion for another day).

My sun-protective hat is off to the folks behind Homegrown Evolution, a blog about sustainable living in ... Echo Park.

Yep, they have chickens. Crops too. And they also have a book called "Urban Homesteading" that they will talk about and sign this Thursday (aka tomorrow) in L.A.

I just discovered blog and book (via BoingBoing), so there's lots to look at.

Now I know of three serious L.A.-area homesteader-types. Can you guess the other two?

Starbucks, we need to talk.

After deciding that the "Coffee" portion of the name Starbucks Coffee was somehow an unimportant afterthought, and continuing a campaign of folly to replace your previous coffee choices with Pike Place Roast, I saw light at the end of a long, dark, watery tunnel.

Dark roasts would be brewed after noon at customer request. This after a period during which the worthless and weak Pike Place Roast (my opinion of the blend has dipped considerably of late) is the only brewed coffee offered during the afternoons.

Never mind that I seem to have trouble getting a dark roast in the morning on many if not most occasions at the various Starbucks locations I stop at during my travails.

Due to this dark-roast deficit, I've gone from, say three or four visits a week to Starbucks down to maybe one.

Let me be plain:

Your lack of coffee is driving me away.

Today I stopped at the Tampa Avenue and Victory Boulevard Starbucks in Reseda.

The line was long. Only two people were behind the counter. The wait was longer than five minutes.

I get to the front of the line. There's a dark roast on the board: Yukon. I like Yukon.

Me: "Can I have a venti drip dark with room?"

The barista goes to fill the cup.

A half-cup comes out.

Barista: "Would you be wiling to wait a few minutes until a fresh pot brews? It'll be free."

Me: "No thanks, just give me the Pikes."

She did end up charging me. I have no problem with that. I don't need to be getting free coffee. I need to be getting good coffee, and after a not-short wait in line, I don't need to be waiting — as I have at this location on more than two occasions — for them to make coffee.

I figured, maybe the Pike Place isn't as bad as I remembered it. At one point, I even said it's not as bad once it cools off.

Allow me to submit Pike Place Roast, as brewed on this day and at this location, for another review:

Horrible.

Howard Schultz, you can futz about the food, revel in your rock-star status and think you're saving the company.

If this Pike Place thing was your idea, just admit that it was a poor one and move on.

If the decision to abandon the drip-coffee business by further restricting the brewing of Starbucks' signature dark roasts was also your idea, just admit that it was a poor one and move on.

If these ideas were cooked up by other Starbucks executives and then OK'd by you, just admit that you made a mistake by willfully gutting your company's core product, do what needs to be done to fix the situation and move on.

You know, it ain't all that hard to make coffee, and I've been doing it more and more. Simone Schramm made a pot today, and I have a pretty good feeling that even though I bought the cheapest coffee in the biggest can I could find at Vons, that it holds up pretty damn well compared to this Pike Place travesty.

I feel bad for Pike Place Market, that iconic Seattle spot at which fish are tossed, for having its name cheapened by such a poor excuse for coffee.

Remember the House Blend? That's way better than Pikes. Even Breakfast Blend, which I'm not particularly fond of, is better. ANY dark roast offered by Starbucks is better.

Stop the bleeding, Howard Schultz.

You had a three-hour nationwide training session on how to make espresso, even though your company uses automatic machines to do so.

How about an eight-hour corporate meeting in Seattle.

Put this Pikes situation on the table.

Admit that Pike Place Blend doesn't measure up.

Start making good coffee again.

Do it for me.

Free WiFi is good, but it just another Starbucks Music, or scary-looking breakfast sandwich taking away from the core business.

Make the coffee. Just do it.

Here's the second part of BoingBoing TV's visit to Intelligentsia Coffee. If there was a God, and if said God cared about such matters, an Intelligentsia would open up in the Valley. No breath being held.

Previously: Intelligentsia Coffee video, Part 1

I got the link from Starbucks Gossip to a Portfolio magazine profile of returning Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz.

First of all, he hates the food. No argument there. He's not keen on turning Starbucks into a full-fledged record company. Another good move (diluting the product = bad).

Nothing new here, but it offers a bit of background on the state of Starbucks:

Starbucks is closing 100 underperforming stores and cutting way back--at least by its own exponential standards--on expansion in the U.S.  There's a super-duper new Swiss-made espresso machine, one promising mass-produced perfection. (It is also lower-slung, allowing baristas to make all-important eye contact with customers.) There's the Clover, an ingenious and expensive--$11,000 a pop--machine for French-pressing coffee by the cup. (So dazzled was Schultz by it that he bought the company.) And there's Pike Place Roast, a new blend designed to strengthen Starbucks in the world of drip coffee, where McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts are nipping at its heels. The blend's name--honoring the location of what has come to be known as Starbucks' flagship store--is a nod to the company's roots, and so is the packaging; it features Starbucks' originally zaftig, busty mermaid, which had been bowdlerized many years ago to placate American bluenoses.

Also addressed is the move from hand-pulled espresso to the automatic variety:

In his book, Schultz admits he was afraid that Starbucks could become "just another soulless big chain." It was highly symbolic in 1999 when he replaced the manual La Marzocco espresso machines with automatic behemoths. The reason, he says, wasn't efficiency but ergonomics: The old models caused repetitive stress injuries. Besides, he insists, the new machines are more reliable.

For many, though, the coffee has never been the same. "The taste of the espresso coming out of those new machines is pure crap," Double_Tall_Latte wrote on StarbucksGossip.com. "There's no crema. No sweetness. No depth." Not that many Starbucks patrons noticed. By now, many of the coffee snobs have gone elsewhere, replaced by teenyboppers determined to do anything to blunt, or obliterate, the taste of coffee.

It's a long, long interview ... read the whole thing if you dare.

A longer version of the Wall Street Journal story has appeared:

With the switch, stores stopped brewing a second coffee in the afternoon, when brewed coffee is less popular, to reduce waste, according to the company. Some customers also said it became more difficult for them to find bold coffees at Starbucks in the morning. The changes prompted some complaints from fans of Starbucks's more-robust blends.

"Because of your many requests for a bolder coffee choice throughout the day at Starbucks, we are bringing it back in the afternoon to many of those stores that sell lots of freshly brewed coffee all day long," Starbucks said in a message posted on its customer feedback Web site Tuesday. The company said it will brew a bolder variety for customers when they ask for it. "This will sometimes mean a small wait, but it will also give you the absolute freshest cup of coffee possible," the company said on the site.

"When they ask for it?" Again. It's Starbucks Coffee. Coffee.

They should just suck it up and make the damn coffee.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Starbucks has decided to stop offering only the light, weak Pike Place Blend and resume brewing "bolder" roasts.

This all I can get of the WSJ story:

By Janet Adamy

Starbucks Corp. is adding back bolder varieties of brewed coffee at some locations after replacing them with a smoother roast this spring.

In April, the Seattle coffee chain introduced a blend of brewed coffee called Pike Place roast and made it the default drip coffee at locations across ...

That's all I've got ... details forthcoming.

And to think I only complained about this yesterday.

I made a quick stop today at the Ralphs market on Burbank Boulevard near Van Nuys Boulevard to check up on the construction of the Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf outpost, as well as the market in general.

You see, like all good Angelenos, we do most of our shopping at Trader Joe's, since Ralphs draws you in with double coupons and advertised specials while violating you big time on just about everything else.

So I don't get over to Ralphs all that often. There's quite a bit of construction going on at the market, but the bones of the Coffee Bean setup are there. It's built, but not ready for operation.

I don't have a photo (although there was another guy there shooting it with a digital camera), but it looks pretty much like the Coffee Bean kiosks at the Westfield Topanga and Promenade malls. I don't know if they're going to do any seating. It would be nice, but I'm not expecting it.

Parking at the Ralphs is dicey at best, but that's also the case at the Starbucks across the street. Seating for coffee-drinkers would be great, but again, I'm expecting nothing in that regard and will be pleasantly surprised if there is anything of the kind.

I said this when the Starbucks moved in, replacing the Red Chariot, a bar known more for having serial killer Glen Edward Rogers as a customer more than anything else. The bartender was very nice to me one day when I got locked out of the house clothed only in a pair of shorts ... but that's another story for another time.

As I was saying, I give Starbucks major, major credit for opening not one but four locations in Van Nuys and the best Starbucks in the East Valley (in an expansive former bank building on Coldwater Canyon Avenue and Victory Boulevard in North Hollywood), none of which are within spitting distance of Ventura Boulevard.

There was considerable vision at work, and I'm sure the whole enterprise has been very profitable for Starbucks, seeing as there is no competition whatsoever in the vicinity of each and every one of those locations.

And it may be years later, but Coffee Bean will have no problem siphoning off considerable business from its across-the-street rival.

While the Coffee Bean kiosk is being built, there is Coffee Bean coffee available in those big thermos-ish dispensers near the deli counter. But hopefully the full-fledged Coffee Bean will be ready for action in the days or weeks ahead.

I even had my recharged Starbucks card at the ready so I can potentially take advantage of the free wireless Internet offer from the big coffee company, should I ever be toting a laptop, find a power plug because all my batteries are dead, actually have the time to sit at Starbucks and use free WiFi ...

And I know it's 111 degrees outside in Woodland Hills.

But I still want coffee.

I want the Starbucks dark roast of the day. Not Pike Place Blend.

But the very friendly barista at Starbucks, corner of Oxnard Street and Canoga Avenue in Warner Center says, "No dark roast, only Pike."

She sees the look on my face.

She elaborates, "There no dark roast after 12 noon."

I reply: "Ever?"

It certainly seems to be so.

For now, anyway.

That's one way to make the Pike Place Roast sales soar: offer nothing else. Hey, if it worked for the Soviet Union, it just might work for Starbucks.

The friendly barista took pity on me and wouldn't charge me for my hot venti drip of Pikes on this even hotter day. (Thanks! ... but what are those corporate people smoking?)

I can only hope that this is somehow related to the hot weather and that all will be righted when the ambient air temperature dips below 100.

I direct the rest of this entry to Howard Schultz, returning CEO of Starbucks:

It's called Starbucks Coffee. So make me some coffee. The good stuff.

Meanwhile: in other news, my neighborhood Starbucks is about to get some competition in the form of a Coffee Bean kiosk in the Ralphs market directly across Burbank Boulevard in Van Nuys.

I bet they have dark roast. Lots of it.

In the video above, BoingBoing TV does a tour of Intelligentsia's coffee kingdom and generally shows us why the Silver Lake establishment blows Starbucks — and just about everybody else, too — out of the proverbial brown water.

In case you want to check out Intelligentsia for yourself, it's at 3922 W. Sunset Blvd. rith where the Sunset Junction neighborhood appears to begin. There's plenty of parking in the neighborhood. Order a few cups and take a pound or more to go.

And according to the video title, this is only Part 1. Hopefully that means there's more geeky coffee goodness on the way.

All Intelligentsia needs is a bit of scale (and an outlet way closer to me) to dig a hole, pop Starbucks into it and shovel the dirt right back.

When Ilene wrote about the tomato salmonella scare and about growing our own — in a pot, no less — I didn't know that she shot the photograph in her post using our very own Sweet 100 tomato plant as the model.

Well, I ate the first two tomatoes from the plant tonight, and they were extremely delicious.

Sweet and perfect. Perfect in a way that no store-bought tomato can be. Especially because it's hard to find them due to the salmonella issue. (Hopefully "the authorities," whoever they may be, will track down the offending tomatoes, tamp down the hysteria and get the now-in-season fruit back on the shelves, especially romas).

I grew a Sweet 100 plant a number of years back, but I don't remember the tomatoes being this good.

We got this plant as a seedling at the Tomatomania event a few months back.

Part of the secret is my homegrown compost blend. Here's how I make it:

• Throw old kitchen scraps, yard waste (leaves, grass, no Whitman), leftover everything into a can.
• Wait until it rots to hell
• Mix in liberally (not conservatively) with dirt
• Make sure plant has a giant saucer under it, because the water that leaks out is extremely disgusting — but nutrient rich!

I heard about this guy on BoingBoing, and it turns out he has quite a few videos on YouTube.

Here's one:

I don't mean to invoke the name of former and current CEO Howard Schultz every time something at Starbucks pisses me off, but the problem is that when you don't have the basics, what do you have?

I'm at the Sherman Oaks Galleria location on Saturday, watching all the "Sex and the City" moviegoers hobble on by in too-high heels, and I go to order a drip coffee.

My choices?

Pike Place ... and Pike Place decaf.

No dark roast. Not even House blend, which is better than Pikes.

If you think this Pike Place thing is working, Howard Schultz, rest assured that it is not. I don't know if you've done market research and concluded that 90 percent of customers prefer a weak blend to a traditionally Starbucks-ian dark roast, but please know that I am not among them.

This is grounds for ... just make sure there's dark roast brewing all day, every day, OK?

I found this baby finch Web cam site via Boing Boing. Just click on the picture above for all the baby-bird Web cam-ness you want/need.