What’s dark, sleek, mysterious and talk of the machine town? The Mavam under-counter espresso machine! For this reason, we couldn’t resist the opportunity to feature the Mavam on the October edition of BeanScene. #simplystable
Taste Baguette
Most city-based cafés are right in the thick of high-rise buildings, traffic jams and busy office workers, but not Taste Baguette.
The small hole-in-the-wall venue is located in Adelaide’s city centre, but a visit here will take you far away from anything resembling hustle and bustle. Inside, the furniture is warm, rustic and exposed with the tables made from train track railings.
While the space may appear hidden and small, what looms beyond the front counter and ovens is a courtyard out the back to catch the spring rays of sunshine.
“Taste Baguette is more than a café, it’s a place where people come to eat, drink delicious coffee and socialise,” Head Barista Marco Micelli says.
Marco has worked at the café for the past year and describes the venue as “inviting with a great coffee focus”.
“I’d been travelling around the United Kingdom and was looking for work when I first fell in love with coffee,” he says. “I eventually came back to Adelaide and I’m happy to see that it’s an evolving coffee culture that’s feeding off Melbourne and Sydney’s booming coffee scenes. There’s specialty coffee shops popping up all over Adelaide, we’re catching up.”
Taste Baguette serves Campos Coffee’s Superior Blend, which combines Colombian, Papua New Guinean, and African beans. “It has a nice toffee base with fruity notes through its body and butterscotch notes to finish. It’s a fantastic blend,” Marco says.
To keep customers intrigued Marco changes the Campos Coffee blend regularly to give a taste of what’s new and seasonal. Single origin coffees are also rotated on the café’s La Marzocco Linea.
“What I love about Campos is the detail they know and share about their coffee. They make sure we as baristas understand the product so that we can educate our customers,” Marco says.
Anyone walking through the venue will no doubt melt at the smell of freshly baked bread out of the kitchen’s ovens. As the name suggests Taste Baguette makes a large selection of tasty baguettes, just ask Marco. “We serve chicken schnitzel baguettes, prosciutto baguettes, boiled egg and salmon baguette, the list goes on,” he says.
A delectable range of pastries is also available for those with a sweet tooth.
“No matter if someone is indulging in our food or coffee, we want them to feel relaxed. We’ve established a really close community here that’s more like a second home where people are free to express themselves,” Marco says.
Red Cherries Coffee Bar
Karim Decima has ticked off two of his dream coffee goals in the space of five months.
In April 2015 Karim launched Atlas Coffee Roasters, and then came an offer that was too good to refuse.
“Opening a coffee bar was a last minute project. My first priority was to start the roastery. I’m a roaster by trade and I wanted to have greater control over the product we served to customers. But a cute little site in Fremantle popped up and we decided to jump on the opportunity to open our own coffee bar. It was a natural progression of business and friendship to start the café, it just happened a lot quicker than I expected,” Karim says.
Red Cherries is the sister account to Black Cherries’ stall at the Fremantle market, operated by Red Cherries and Atlas Coffee Roasters’ Co-owner Tim Lock.
It became the meeting point for Karim, Tim and Head Barista Whale Hwang. The trio has put their skills to good use and formed Red Cherries Coffee Bar.
The coffee is roasted just 10 minutes down the road in O’Connor, which Karim says is really developing into a niche coffee roasting hub. Karim and Tim roast on a 15-kilogram Toper roaster.
“It has enabled us to have a lot of flexibility in terms of what we roast,” Karim says. “We work one on one with cafés in Fremantle and Perth, creating specific blends to cater to their flavour preferences. We’ve very focused on specialty coffee and roasting for filter coffee. We want to make our coffee approachable to everyone, and a simple beverage for people to sit down and enjoy.”
Karim has been working in the industry for the past 12 years. He says he’s seen a lot of changes in that time, including the quality of beans available in the country, and the quality of equipment and knowledge of baristas.
“Coffee-making used to be more of an art than science, but now it’s become a science more than art. Every sector of the industry has grown and changed in some capacity for the better, now we just need customer service to complement the other changes,” he says. “It’s also thanks to baristas like [Ona Coffee’s] Sasa Sestic who went out and discovered a new way of processing coffee that shows how mature the coffee scene really is.”
Originally from Morocco, Karim says when he first arrived in Australia in 2006 he was immediately impressed with the country’s coffee appreciation. “I was blown away at how advanced the coffee scene was,” he says. “When I go back home the coffee is very different. Moroccan coffee uses lots of Arabica and Robusta beans, but it’s a different experience built on memories more than anything,” he says.
For Atlas Coffee Roasters, Karim buys lots of African and Central American coffees to create the Toubkal blend, named after the highest mountain in Morocco. The coffee is put through a La Marzocco Linea Classic for espresso and milk-based coffees, and a Slayer machine for espresso and filter coffees.
“We like to experiment with our coffee. We taste everything and although we do use tools to measure yield, we rely on our palates to determine a specific profile for every coffee that we use,” Karim says.
Red Cherries’ coffee menu changes weekly, with guest roasters invited for filter and espresso roasts.
Karim says it’s hard to go past his love of Ethiopian coffees, but Costa Rican micro lots, such as La Lia El Dragon comes as a close second favourite.
Red Cherries is located only 20 metres from Perth’s famous cappuccino strip, in a small piazza Karim describes as a “little piece of heaven”.
“It’s an intimate space that’s built using lots of recycled timbers and woodwork by Palletico, and very few bought items. Most of the work has been handmade, with a few Moroccan-inspired touches to the interior as well. It’s a nod to my homeland, but we’re really proud of what we’ve achieved.”
Café Culture
Hospitality has been Andrew Reay’s life since he was 15 years old. He worked as a chef in fine-dining establishments in Launceston, but when the right café location in Trevallyn popped up three years ago, Andrew knew it was time to farewell the commercial kitchen for a more relaxed cooking atmosphere.
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