Aldo Coffee Company

Brunch Thoughts

Yesterday's first-ever brunch was a success.  It certainly seemed people were happy and sated. 

That said, it's not something we plan on offering every Sunday.  We had several people ask us if we were going to do a regular brunch, but not featuring Mexican. 

That's not going to happen.  There's already CCs and Pamelas for the eggs and pancake crowd, plus a very good upscale brunch at Bistro 19.

If we're going to offer brunch in the future, it will have to be on our terms.  And that means brunch menus will be personal, fun, different and meaningful to us.  Because if it's just going through the motions to make a couple more bucks, that's going to show up on your plate and in the service.

Lunch Menu Changes Coming

The patio garden is looking pretty sparse.  We've got about a week's worth of basil and arugula left.  The last few beans will be picked this week.  Doesn't look like we're going to get anymore peppers.  The tomatoes are gone.  Leaving a lot of cilantro and parsley and some hardy thyme, all of which we'll use for infused oils, pestos or flavored butters.

Once the arugula is gone, so are the house salads.  Once the basil is gone, so is the caprese panini.  We're working on some other panini (tuna/olive, cheese/fennel) and thinking about going back to the ciabattinas we used prior to this year - we end up with a lot of end crusts and slices too small to use for anything but bread soups and croutons.  And we've got tons of that already.  We hate the waste. 

Saturdays will feature other soups/stews besides/instead of chili.  We'll still do our Black Cat chili off and on, but doing it every Saturday was limiting.  Today we're doing something wildly different - a sausage-based "Bigos" (Polish/Lithuanian national stew with veal and pork/apple sausages, kielbasa, sauerkraut, cabbage, potato and carrot - we're actually hoping for leftovers). 

We'll be keeping this season's soup menu as interesting as possible - still lots of peasant soups from all regions of Italy.  And some "finer", more delicate and nuanced "classic" soups. But we'll also be expanding our repertoire into other cultures to give a taste of some cuisines that aren't yet well represented in the South Hills.  And due to demand, our New Year's Day "hangover cure" peanut soup will make more than just the one annual appearance this year.

One caveat:  We sometimes make bigger batches of some soups as the process more or less dicates a larger quantity.  So sometimes you'll see "encores" of something we've served relatively recently.  We need to do this in order to clear space for the next recipe.

We appreciate the feedback we get on the soups and we're especially delighted that y'all are keeping an open mind about some of the stuff we're putting out (collard greens!).

We never set out to be food-based, but it certainly seems that there's often more buzz about soup around here than about coffee.  As long as about a taste experience outside the same-old-same-old and we're opening up palates to something different, whether it's coffee or soup or anything else on the menu, it's all good with us. 

Soup Is Back On. Oatmeal, too.

It's cooled off enough for hot soup to begin flowing again. We'll be offering a tasty homemade soup every day (except Sunday).  We also started making our steel-cut oatmeal with fruit this morning, which will also be available Mon-Sat.

The daily soup special will be posted in the Twitter box at right (which you can have sent to your cell phone/PDA).

Menu Changes Coming

Heads up: we're throwing out the entire lunch menu.  No more North Beach, tuna, or clubs, so you've got two days to say goodbye to those items.  A new lunch menu will be in place come Monday that will focus more on lighter fare and local ingredients.  Change is good.

Today's Challenge: Make a Quiche from Signature Drink Components

We're taking a break from sanity for the afternoon to do something that's never been done (or at least it's not on Google) - we're making our Sunday quiche using Belle's, John's and Sonja's competition drinks as the ingredient list.

Which gives us:  chocolate, sea salt, olive oil, almond, orange, millefiore honey, half and half, rose syrup and San Pellegrino water in addition to Black Cat espresso.  We're adding eggs (it is quiche, after all) and probably some fresh strawberries, which would be in the spirit of Sonja's "Rosa/Love" drink.

What we ended up doing was incorporating the almonds (and some pecans) in the crust.  The chocolate, orange, half and half and honey (and more pecans) went into the egg filling.  The rose syrup and olive oil were used to coat the strawberries on top.  A ring of Trapani sea salt was added for design after baking was complete.

Never did figure out how to use the San Pellegrino.  Plus, there's no espresso in the quiche itself.  You'll have to order that on the side.

Will Black Cat Black Bean Chili Make You Jittery?

We encounter this question more as our house-specialty chili becomes more and more popular.

The answer is no.  We switched to using decaf Black Cat espresso blend a few batches ago with no effect on taste.  There's already enough going on in there to wake up your entire system without the caffeine.

Kenya Kangocho Auction Lot

We received another microlot of this year's outstanding crop of Kenyans, this time it's the "Kangocho" auction lot.

This is the third Kenyan micro-lot we've featured in the past couple of months.  However, in looking at Intelligentsia's tasting notes, they seem to take us back to a different microlot that we've already featured.

So rather than rely on Intelligentsia, let's just go with our noses and palates. 

Coffee Pairings Coming Next Week

Yeah, we said "coffee pairings".  Like wine pairings, only not with wine.  We're not the first ones to think of it.  Not even the first to do it in Pittsburgh (Peet's did a coffee-dessert pairing at Eleven a few months back.)

We're not doing anything quite as fab as Navarre or Eleven.  Basically all we'll be doing is to try to work our soup offerings with whatever coffees we have on hand each week.

How does this work?  Well, for one thing, coffee goes with most foods anyway.  But, some coffees go better with certain foods than others. Let's say we're doing something with a Los Delirios Nicaragua, which features notes of cranberry, wild honey, allspice and chocolate, expect a soup with some snap, like a roasted parsnip or perhaps something with ginger.

 

New Menu Items

One of our New Year's resolutions is to try to act more like adults.  So we've published our first ever breakfast menu so you don't have to point at stuff or ask "how much is that?".   And we've also put it online.

We've had a lunch menu in the store for a long time, but we've now got one of those online too.

You'll note that the PMT is out for now - the quality of basil we've bought lately has been a bit tough and not fresh-tasting and tomatoes are out of season anyway.  We'll bring it back later in the year.  We've added a roasted veggie and chevre option as well as an egg/pancetta/asiago option that we're testing out for a couple of weeks.

Hooray menus!  And to think it only took three years to get this far ;-)

El Cubano Is Coming

 It's been awhile since we've added a new panino to the menu.  But we've been working on a new one we think will be very popular:

El Cubano.

Ours is a variation on the traditional Ybor City Cuban sandwich - roast pork marinated in mojo, ham (Isaly's, of course), Genoa salame (the difference between Tampa and Miami versions), swiss cheese, pickle and mustard on ciabattina.

We'll begin serving El Cubanos on Saturday. 

Unfortunately, something has to give, so we'll be retiring the prosciutto and mozzarella as of Monday.

UPDATE:  Seems we've broken a few hearts with this decision, so we're going to compromise:  Cubanos on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturdays.  Prosciutto on Monday, Wednesday and Friday.  At least through October.