It’s quite bizarre. Even though I live only a few hundred kilometers away from Italy, and Bavaria is seemingly filled with Italians and their restaurants, but it’s often a quest to find a proper cappuccino anywhere in Bavaria. If you’re lucky, you find a place where they have a proper espresso machine, but it’s apparently hard to find a person to handle it? The coffee often is very poor, even when the machine is good. Don’t get me started about the milk. Germans – without exceptions – create their own version of bubble soap. And then they just throw it in your coffee cup because they are in a rush. There’s none of the magic that makes a good cappuccino a good cappuccino. Frothing milk is an art in and of itself. I don’t want to wash dishes with my milk, so I don’t need soap bubbles. Milk should be velvety smooth and blend in with the coffee perfectly. Only then can you make a good cappuccino. Look, I don’t care for a swan shape poured into my cappuccino, but at least when there’s one of these hipster barista muppets around, then you can be sure the cappuccino is good. You can’t pour a swan out of shittily frothed milk. (I have yet to find a swan in a German coffee place.)
This morning we walked five minutes, walked into the first place we saw that had coffee, and there we got it. A perfectly balanced cappuccino. Maybe two years in Germany numbed my expectations. It may have been a severely mediocre one, but in my current world it was perfect. And then the rest of the day doesn’t even matter.
(but the west coast of lake Como is pretty good too)
Robin Heinen 