Occasionally a dish or a drink merits more than one blog, and that's the case here. A friend of mine, who was in ill health and who liked real Irish coffee, told me to visit the Buena Vista in San Francisco where he thought Irish coffee had been invented. Unfortunately my friend passed away before I got there, but get there I did, and I learned more about this cocktail at this cafe with the nice bay view. There's a plaque outside the cafe that lets you know that this drink was invented at Shannon airport in Ireland, a fact I already knew; what I didn't know was that it was invented during the second world war when fighter pilots needed a shot in their coffee for extra courage. What I also found out from the barman at the Buena Vista is that the sugar cube changes the viscosity of the coffee so that it helps the lightly whipped cream to float. I was also privy to the fact that the Buena Vista uses Tillamore Dew because other Irish whiskeys, like Jameson, are sweeter, and you don't want sweeter because there's already a sugar cube in the coffee. The glasses used for serving Irish coffee are pre-warmed, and there were sixteen on the bar with hot water in them even though the place was unusually quiet. (I was prepared to wait in line, but I didn't have to.) When I ordered a second Irish coffee, the barman announced that “The second one always tastes better.” The first one tasted just fine to me, and I toasted my dear friend Jeff who had passed; on the second one, I toasted Joe Sheridan, the inventor of this fine drink. It's not just coffee and whiskey; it's an art to get the cream just right so that you can enjoy drinking the cocktail through the cream without the cream mixing into the coffee itself. The first Irish coffee in America was served at the Buena Vista in 1952, four years before I was born.
Location: Buena Vista Cafe, 2765 Hyde Street, San Francisco, California. Date: September 17, 2019.
2 Comments
Alfredo
9/23/2019 12:07:49 am
Irish coffee seems to be the only nutritionally perfect food, containing all four essential food groups: sugar, fat, caffeine, and alcohol.
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Roland Petrov
9/23/2019 10:50:14 am
Your observation, while brilliant, omits the fact that Irish coffee can not sustain life; it can only enhance it.
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AuthorChef Roland has been a legal resident of seven countries and has travelled in over thirty, documenting food along the way. He currently resides in the desert in Southern California. Categories
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