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Rating: Standard, Mid-range Calabrian coffee
Walking into the West side of the medieval Roman Ghetto area you encounter a very nice corner lot caffe. The Caffetteria Guido is a late 20th century establishment (established in 1980) that still keeps on chugging out coffee. It’s interior looks recently redone, and is marked by a division into three areas. The front shop has tons of traditional Italian sweets (sweet breads, candy, chocolates from the Italian peninsula), the coffee bar area, and then a restaurant-bistro type zone in the very back. With the many cafes in this part of Rome, it stood out to me for it’s neatly tailored and impeccable tidiness (the other bars I’ve visited tend to be a bit less well taken care of). The barista was a duo of an older guy who knew every customer by first name, and a younger one who was doing his best to be as courteous as possible. Simply put, you felt really well taken care of in this place.
Asking for a coffee directly at the bar (the cashier said I could pay before or after having my coffee, as she was directly next to the entrance of the café, I asked just in case):
Presentation: A very concise, clean, and shiny cup of coffee. The cup is a little big for my taste, but the spoon was of an interesting design, and just right for the bottom half of the cup (i.e, to be able to best stir the sugar down there!). No water was offered, but it was given to another client automatically.
Temperature of Cup: The temperature was good, not hot, not scalding. Warm to the touch and welcoming.
Quantity: It was a full espresso, probably a bit longer than an ounce (30ml) and felt more like 1.5 ounces.
Temperature: Ouch! I was betrayed by the temperature of the cup- the coffee inside was very hot and I burnt my tongue on it. As you can see below, the cups were stacked up on each other quite high on the espresso machine, so I probably got one of the ones on the very top of the heap, which is a bit cooler than those on the bottom. Ugh… I do admit that after waiting for another minute, the coffee cooled down quickly.
Volume/Consistency: It was light, thin, not thick, and called for drinking another espresso. The quantity diluted the thickness of this coffee and made it less heavy than I would have liked. It wasn’t sandy, nor silky, but thin.
Crema: It was thin, uniform, and stubborn. It stayed on the surface even after I gave it a good swirl various times in order to see if the thickness of the coffee improved. It was too bland for my likes, and showed no signs of living third-wave coffee roasted oils, etc…
Odor: It was aromatic, and for the first time in a long while, there was a sweeter smell of coffee emanating from this cup. It wasn’t dark-roasted rancid as usual, but rather a light coffee scent that was pleasing.
Taste: The coffee was very bitter. The taste profile was flat, no room to move in, and while it didn’t go into rancidness, it was simply too bitter for me. Quite powerful.
Overall: It was a solid normal coffee. It’s bad qualities were the extra high temperature, it’s thinness, and the lack of oils in the coffee. It was a mid- to low espresso, but overall, it was OK.
The setup: As you can see, it was a nice, and tidy Faema being used. The grinder, I couldn’t see what it was, is in all probability another Faema. The Coffee, was interesting, it was Mauro Caffè a Reggio Calabria roaster from 1949 that sits in the straight of Messina. It’s got a fancy website and appears to be, from what their website says, a very important Italian roaster. Its tag line is 'a tostatura lenta' or slow roasted coffee... I couldn't see how that translated to my cup, but either way I was glod I got to taste and discover this roaster! I hope I run into this again in order to see what other types of coffee can come from these beans. Being a southern-Italian roaster, I’d expect very rich, thick espresso from them.
Caffetteria Guido,
Bar Guido Mariarita
Via Santa Maria del Pianto 59A
00186 Roma