Rating: Standard, low-end Roman coffee
Here’s a place that has everything going for it, except what we’re interested in here in this site: a decent cup of coffee. Next to the Ottaviano metro station in the Prati area, the Donan Bar Caffè has a ‘picturesque’ façade, has a nice set of outdoor seating, and the interior is ample and had people lounging in its interior. As you enter you have the bar area that kind of splits the rectangular room in half, with the back end being full of tables. As you sell below, the espresso machine was fist class, and well… there’s some room for improvement here.
Asking for a coffee got this placed on the bar:
Presentation: No water offered. The barista, from the south of Italy, was deep in conversation with the cashier about a date he’d had the previous weekend. I’m sure he would have obliged with water, but I didn’t ask. The cup was clean, there was a drip on the edge- maybe when he pulled the cup off the machine? The spoon was of good temperature and landed like that, upside down- fun.
Temperature of Cup: The cup was damned hot, scalding hot, bloody hell hot! What great way to start the espresso…
Quantity: The espresso was rather long. I think the drip on the cup was because the espresso was over extracted and that’s just rancid crema back-end freely dripping into the cup. Fun.
Temperature: After waiting at least 3 minutes, the coffee was still very hot. Too hot to fully appreciate. I waited a bit more, but then the barista had a second look at my cup to see if I’d drank it already, and gave me a strange look when I hadn’t. He must have thought there was something wrong with me for letting a perfectly hot coffee go ‘cold’…. In southern Italy a coffee is not good if it’s not still boiling in your throat. Go figure!
Volume/Consistency: It was very thin, cutting, and sharp- the temperature and thinness of the coffee turned it into a object cutting through my mouth, rather than a drink.
Crema: It was thin, became almost transparent nearly immediately, and yet was not bad looking. It was dark brown with a lighter area showing how the shot was left on too long.
Odor: No odor, this is standard fare here in Rome.
Taste: It was very bitter, and was rubbing shoulders with the rancid area. It was so thin and bitter that I had a difficult time differentiating if it was just rancid or deeply bitter. Had it been a bit metallic, like it is when poured out of old dirty machines it would have been rancid and undrinkable.
Overall: Overall, it was doable, and not entirely impossible. It was a low-end espresso. Too hot, no oil content, over-extracted, yet drinkable. The potential for this café is big, see why below.
The setup: Man, this is a Royal Espresso Galileo machine with independent temperature control for each group, and generally a really beautiful machine (Here’s a link of the same machine from the BFC website- I don’t know what the relationship is between Royal and BFC, but they seem to share the same products…). The grinder was a nice boxy Anfim. All the elements for good coffee. What they were brewing was Classico Caffe Circi. This is a Roman based roaster that offers up traditional very bitter coffee. I haven’t had spectacular examples from it yet, but definitely they can do better than this. With these machines I’m sure in 20 minutes of honing in, you can get a stellar espresso.
Donan Bar Caffè
Zevola Sabrina
Via Barletta 9b-9C
00192 Roma
Tel. 06 372 9811
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