Rukavina's Coffee Roundup

Peter Rukavina has been making the rounds around charlottetown coffee places trying each of their cappuccinos and putting the unworthy ones in their place and has come down basically along the same lines as I have in my past experiences.

Delta Prince Edward: "served luke-warm...deflated foam...coffee that was bland and tasteless."

Cora's: "Charging more than $2.50 for this luke-warm, tasteless coffee-substitute is criminal."

Brett Bustion (Farmer's Market): "very, very good coffee....The coffee was robust without tasting like burnt rubber. "

Linda's Coffee Shop: "I was so happy to have found a place that approximates what I had in Italy that I walked over after my meal to thank the man who’d made it for me, and we had a nice chat."

Bo's To Go (ATC): "“burnt all to hell” taste on the beans. The foam at Bo’s was dreadful and tasteless, and the whole experience was rendered almost completely null and void because Bo’s only serves coffee in paper cups, so there was also a faint aftertaste of paper and glue."

Mavor's: "Mavor’s cappuccino was about as bite-free and bland as you can imagine. It’s not hard to imagine why Starbucks — whose coffee Mavor’s “proudly brews” — has spread around the world like wildfire: if my cappuccino was typical of their swill, their product is designed to neither offend nor particularly delight anyone.

Timothy's: "the nicest staff of all the coffee shops in town (and certainly the hippest) and it’s the most pleasant coffee shop to simply hang out in. But, alas, the cappuccino came served in a standard coffee mug, which is just plain wrong. And as a result the coffee languished separate and apart from the foam, and it was impossible to effectively stir in the sugar. The coffee itself, perhaps for related reasons, tasted weak and diluted. Sadly, I came away unimpressed."

Beanz: "wasn’t bad"


Probably not convenient for a morning coffee since I don't know what time they open, but Cedar's has excellent cappuccino, at least last time I had it a couple of years ago. The coffee was nice and strong but not tortured, and the foam melted away perfectly into the proper little espresso cup..

Piece of Cake's cappucino is basically the same bland affair in a too-tall glass as Mavor's, which is too bad because the food there is top notch and I love the atmosphere. Cafe Diem does a little better but the coffee still doesn't taste like coffee to me, so it's all just warm milkshakes. The culinary institute needs to offer esspresso crash courses, that seems to be the biggest sin everybody but the few good exceptions are committing.

All of this is making me want to get an espresso maker for the new place. Oh yeah, I could probably mention that Sabrina and I are going to be roomies starting in January. After searching high and low and seeing some pretty run-down houses and torn-up, cardboard apartments, luck brought me to a very nice house in downtown Charlottetown which we walked through and took right away. Damage deposit now paid, I can now say that we've got a pretty sweet new place.

On another plus, I think I'm actually moving even closer to my invisible neighbour m.r.. Maybe we'll actually run into each other offline one of these days.

In other news, I've been working late at work and am starting to get really used to it. It's almost not unpleasant when the constant phone calls and e-mails and chasing people and harrassing them to do things subsides and you can actually work on something for a while. Too bad it's not going to last.