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"  There has been a great coffee awakening, and chances are it has found its way to a restaurant near you. A little history: barista coffee, the kind you get at coffee bars and even good chains, has long cluster-bombed the bejeezus out of the brownish fluid served in restaurants in terms of quality and care. This was once mainly due to chefs&amp;#039; resistance to seeing coffee as part of their domain. Coffee was not afforded the same attention given other spices \u2014 instead the chef purchased ground beans on spec from places like Sarah Lee and stored it like dried pasta in the pantry. Worse, unlike anything else on the menu, its preparation was relegated to the food runners or wait staff. Then in the &amp;#039;90s coffee started moving our love needles, and a new profession was created: the &amp;quot;barista.&amp;quot; Some chefs took notice, and the coffee station slowly began migrating closer to the chef&amp;#039;s radar. (A few missed the point and invited the likes of Starbucks into the kitchen, with disastrous results.) Regardless, the &amp;quot;schooling&amp;quot; typically dished out by the chef to the corner joint was clearly reversed. But a few roasters rose up, mostly from the scattered DNA of the late-&amp;#039;80s Seattle scene, and leaned into the task of arming the chefs with the kind of coffee their patrons deserved. (I was, if you haven&amp;#039;t detected it yet, one of those types, and a shameless pundit for the cause.) The first to react were the star chefs, who quickly brought coffee preparation under the white-jacket roof \u2014 Gray Kunz, Jean-Marie Lacroix, Daniel Boulud, Alain Ducasse, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten, to name a few. And now comes the new generation of chef. Every day another one receives a truly professional espresso machine \u2014 the Synesso for example, a truly balanced blend \u2014 and power shifts by one degree. Restaurateur Steven Starr&amp;#039;s Parc Restaurant, in Philadelphia, does 2,000 covers a day and rocks a pair of saliva-producing machines like an impressive coffee joint. Meanwhile, the barista contingency is in disarray, chasing the dragon with slow-brew apparati, intensifying the drink as though it were the only part of the meal and spending time shadow-boxing in weekend hipster-barista competitions. We are only a contractor&amp;#039;s call away from fine restaurants opening a window to the sidewalk to serve people who have grown weary of these geek baristas. The state of this &amp;quot;coffee war&amp;quot; is best summed up by the talented chef John Des Rosiers of Chicago, who said upon seeing his new Synesso espresso machine, &amp;quot;Say hello to my little friend.&amp;quot; Todd Carmichael is the co-founder of La Colombe Torrefaction and is the first American to cross Antarctica to the South Pole alone on foot. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/food-drink/drinks/a7826/good-restaurant-coffee-061310/>