It's officially been fall for a couple of days. Nights are cooler, days are more comfortable. A few leaves are falling off the trees (time to get those driveway cracks sealed before it's too late!)
We were just putzing around with some ideas for a new fall/winter signature drink menu when it occurred to us to take a moment and catch our breath. And to put down some thoughts that haven't made it to the blog as their own posts.
So in no particular order, here's the brain dump from this summer:
- The kitchen in insufferably hot when it's 90 degrees and 90% humidity. When the dishwasher is running and there's something in the oven, it downright hell in there. That explains some of Rich's overall crankiness the past couple of months. But the rest of it he was born with ;-)
- We've come to a truce with smoothies. As we really care about coffee first and foremost, we'd rather you order a cold coffee drink when it's hot outside. Or even an iced tea. But after three summers, we recognize we smoothies at a coffeehouse are a fact of life on Washington Road. And we're actually pretty good at it.
- 100% people who've had Shakeratos enjoy them. Now if we can only get that across to the 95% of folks who think ice cold espresso is somehow "wrong"...
- People love well-made traditional 6oz cappuccinos if they can get past the "big chain drink" mentality. We've made hundreds of converts.
- People will come to coffee cuppings if you're offering them some great coffees to experience. People will not come to cuppings if you promote it as a rare opportunity to discover what coffee defects taste like. Seems that we reached a bit too far with that exercise. But we saved the defects for tonight's staff training. And they're so looking forward to it ;-)
- This season's Black Cat espresso is much less tempermental than last year's.
- We didn't spend more on our Esmeralda auction coffee because we wanted to see how sales went before commiting a ton of money on it. Turns out our caution was well-founded. While it's a great coffee, it's not an everyday coffee that people will buy every week. So we're parsing out the rest of our lot slowly, although we'll roast extra for the holidays.
- We need better tools to work on our equipment. The bargain stuff can strip nuts. We also learned that thin copper tubing is fragile.
- Two local coffeeshops closed this summer. We consider ourselves fortunate that we're still growing. Thank you for your continued patronage.
- We're looking forward to visiting the new shops we've helped train the past few months.
- We learned from numerous catering gigs that we can make a great espresso under a tent on a hot summer's day or in an air-conditioned conference room at goosebump-producing chilliness or in your kitchen with all your company looking on. Just give us an electrical outlet and we're good to go.
- First Fridays are worth staying open late for. Other Fridays not so much. Especially once high school football season is underway. We'll be open late this Friday and next, but closing on Friday nights as of October 10 (there will be a separate post on that one).
- Homemade coffeecakes and bread puddings are viewed as good things.
- Compotes featuring anything but fruit to accompany a chocolate silk tart are not viewed as good things. I guess that's your way of telling us just because we "can" doesn't mean we "should", even if the result tastes great. But we get to eat whatever doesn't sell, so it's not a total loss.
- We need to time our patio plantings better so that all the basil and cilantro planters don't go to seed at once.
- We need to transplant our tomato seedlings earlier. This was a major disappointment since those were seedlings we started from San Marzano seeds we bought in Firenze last year.
- We missed not going to Firenze this year.
- We succeeded at growing our own arugula and lettuce. Those will be staples next summer. If we had more space, we'd plant additional beans as well. There's no salad as tasty as one that's been grown 15 feet from the kitchen.
- Otherwise reasonable people will ignore a readily available ashtray to extinguish their smoke in a planter of fresh herbs. We don't want to ban smoking on the patio, but the few of you who do smoke out there have to work with us on this one point.
- Cold soups don't sell well enough here for us to offer them. Except for gazpacho. But nobody wants to eat gazpacho everyday.
- If you can make a vegan blueberry muffin taste good, non-vegans will buy them. We could sell more if we wanted to spend more time in the kitchen making them. Maybe when it cools down even more...
- Since Dorothy asked us to offer Fritos with our Saturday chili, people have been fairly vocal about us not having them a couple of times when we forgot to buy a bag. Who knew?
- We can safely say that we make the best seitan of any establishment in Mt. Lebanon. That's because we're the only place that makes it. Don't knock ersatz "buffalo chicken" until you've tried it. If things get much worse and we have another Great Depression, you'll wish you had the recipe ;-)
- We could've started hot soups two weeks ago. But you'll have to wait until Monday.
OK. Now we can "officially" get ready for fall.
How was your summer? Learn anything new?
Belle's final regularly scheduled shift with us starts in about a half hour. It's a sad day in many respects as we'll miss her skills, charm and humor behind the bar four times a week. But as she's moving onto something she's wanted to do since day one, our sadness is tempered by our happiness for her.
Speaking of which, while Belle may not compete at the upcoming MARBC (which will be held in Cranberry, Feb 7-9), that other Battista, hubby Frank, has indicated he is willing to step up and enter. So there may be a Battista to defend the crown.
Free show, all ages. 8:00-9:45pm. 
A few weeks ago we started a lovely relationship with Krenzelak Orchards. They're a regular vendor at the Uptown Mt. Lebanon Farmers Market every Saturday morning. Whatever they don't sell from their stand, we buy later that afternoon. 
Aldo's Slideshow 
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