DEGLI ARTISTI CAFFÈ, VIA DI TOR CERVARA 287, 00155 ROMA

Rating: Poor, undrinkable Roman coffee

I was still on the lookout for a decent coffee next to the immigration office in the Tor Sapienza area. The New York 777 Caffe was simply awful, and well, I had hopes of something better. So I saw that there was the Caffè degli Artisti, and it had a coffee roaster I didn’t recognize and jumped to the occasion. I walked in and it was dead quiet. The owner was quite laid back. I had to wait until the barista came back so it was about 5 minutes. Once he came back, a heard of other folk also walked in, all locals, and we asked a good 10 espressi from the guy. The barista was very attentive to each person.

This is what I got served:

Presentation: Nice clean cup, crisp, rather large for my tastes and conservative in form. Looks like a cup from the mid 50s or something. The spoon was rather large for the cup. No water was offered to me, but given to others who asked for it without a flinch.

Temperature of Cup: Cup was warm but not terribly hot. I was optimistic.

Quantity: It was a solid espresso. No stress here.

Temperature: Man… did I get a surprise, it was extremely hot, boiling hot, I totally burnt my tongue on this like an inexperienced fool… serves me right. I had to wait quite a lot until it became drinkable.

Volume/Consistency: Well, it was thin, cutting, sharp, runny. No oils in there, just thin.

Crema: Well, yeah, I should have read the espresso from the crema. It was totally over extracted, white almost, and cakey and bublly. It started to die out as I waited for the cup to cool down.

Odor: Deep charred coffee smell.

Taste: Ah… must extra bitter, extra sharp, it was simply rancid and quite cutting and stabbing. I must say something was off with this espresso and I simply couldn’t drink it, maybe it was my morale that was low, but it was simply not good.

Overall: It was unfortunately a very poor representation of this coffee. I’ll have to see if I can contact the roaster so that they can suggest another café to try where they serve their beans.

The setup: They had a nice E61 based San Remo espresso machine. The grinder was a Fiorenzato F71 that is also excellent. The roaster is a North Roman roaster, called Fisichella Caffè (FB page here) they’re working out of Formello just about 20 mins out from Rome. They seem to focus on capsule coffee, and have cups and other paraphilia for sale. I hope to try some of their coffee elsewhere, as this simply wasn’t representative, for sure.