June 2014

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Coffee with legs at a cafe con piernas

Tuesday, June 17, 2014 in Chile, Santiago | 7 comments

Santiago is one of those places, like Spain and Florida, where the coffee sucks. I’m not saying you can’t get a decent espresso in Santiago, you can, but the average cup of joe here is worse than what you might find included with the free continental breakfast at a Courtyard by Marriott.
This morning I took the elevator up to the breakfast room on the 21st floor of my hotel where I sat facing a stunning view of the Andes while I tucked into fresh pastries, exquisite fruit, and one of the worst cups of coffee I’ve ever had. I mean, I knew that in Chile when you ask for coffee you traditionally get Nescafé, but this wasn’t even that good. I don’t know what it was. Carob powder? Instant chai?
If I don’t get a decent cup of coffee in the morning, I’m not fit for human conversation. Which was a real problem this morning because I was meeting Daniela, an editor for a Chilean magazine, early for a walking tour of downtown Santiago.
“Listen,” I told Daniela when she asked me if I wanted to go inside the Biblioteca Nacional for a look around, “if I don’t get some coffee quickly, I’m going to start kicking one of these street dogs…and what’s with all the street dogs anyway?”
Okay, fine, said Daniela, a dark-haired woman fresh out of college in Buenos Aires where she studied photography. “Would you like to go to a café con piernas?”

Photos by David Lansing

Photos by David Lansing

“Great,” I said, thinking this was the name of some Starbucks-like Santiago chain.
She led me to a very sleek, very modern café just off Plaza Armas confusingly called Café Haiti. Inside, a bevy of rather serious-looking (or perhaps bored) young women in brightly-colored short dresses and three-inch heels were serving espresso and café cortado, strong coffee with a little milk, to sharply-dressed businessmen standing up at a long chrome and black granite bar.


Café con piernas—coffee with legs—have been around “since before I was born,” Daniela told me. “I don’t know why. They are very Chilean. I heard someone tried to open one in Argentina but it immediately failed.”
These Chilean Hooters-for-the-coffee-set seem odd in a country where divorce was only recently legalized and abortion is still illegal. But while there was a definite sexist vibe to the place (Daniela, the only woman in the place not working, admitted she’d never been inside a café con piernas before—“This is a place for men”), I found Café Haiti to be oddly sedate—the men here seemed more interested in their coffee and their conversations with other men than in the women sashaying over to them on high heels while delicately balancing a tray full of beverages. There was no overt flirting, no boisterous joking, no sly winks. Frankly, I’d seen bawdier atmosphere at a corporate cocktail mixer. Which might explain things since at a café con piernas there is also no alcohol. Just a bunch of women who look like they might be backup dancers for the Like-A-Virgin-era Madona serving fairly decent coffee.

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In search of a terremoto in Santiago

Monday, June 16, 2014 in Chile, Santiago | 3 comments

Where am I? What day is it? I hardly know after the schlep to L.A., a flight to Toronto, hours in the airport sitting around drinking coffee and watching endless hours of hockey (which seems to be the only thing shown on Canadian television), then a red-eye to Santiago and a long (well, it seemed long) taxi ride to my hotel, the San Cristobal Tower. I mean, when I left it was dark and then it was light and then it was dark again then light again and now I think it’s starting to get dark. Again. I feel like Major Tom—floating in a most peculiar way/And the stars look very different today.

That’s what happens when you fly from one hemisphere to the other. That and early summer suddenly becomes early winter. It’s cold here! Well, not cold exactly, since Santiago has a Mediterranean climate, but definitely chil-e. On my way in from the airport it started to rain.

Christ, I spend a month in Italy waiting for the sun to come out and the wisteria to bloom and now I’m back to gloomy skies, short days, and a city where everyone is wearing ponchos and knit caps.

I am here on a mission to explore Chilean cuisine. Is there such a thing? I don’t know, but let me ask you a question: What’s the name of your favorite Chilean restaurant? Can’t name one, can you. Me neither. So, prodded by a conversation I had with my taxi driver on the way in from the airport, I go down to the hotel concierge.

“Excuse me,” I say to the woman behind the desk who looks to be maybe 20.

“Yes, Mr. Lansing?” (I secretly like it when the staff at nice hotels address me by my name. It makes me feel so grown up.)

“I am going to give you a sentence and then I want you to say it back to me filling in the missing words. Okay?”

(She smiles while giving me a quizzical look.)

“I want you to say to me, ‘Mr. Lansing, if you have been in Santiago but you haven’t had the—blank—you haven’t been to Santiago.’ Do you understand?”

The concierge, whose name, according to the little tag on her shirt, is Inés, is confused. “You mean you want me to tell you something you must eat in Santiago?”

“Exactly! But I want it to be a quintessential thing. Something that screams ‘Santiago!’ So try it.”

Inés clears her throat as if she were about to give an oral report in her history class at the Universidad de Chile. “Mr. Lansing, if you have been to Santiago but you haven’t had…(and here she rolls her eyes while she’s thinking very, very hard)…if you haven’t had…(her eyes light up and she claps her hands)…a terremoto! you haven’t been to Santiago.”

“Inés,” I say, leaning forward and putting my elbows on her waist-high concierge desk, “what the hell is a terremoto?”

“It’s a cocktail!” Inés says excitedly. “A famous Chilean cocktail! And if you have never had one, well then, Mr. Lansing, you haven’t been to Santiago!”

I thank Inés and take the elevator up to the bar at L’Etoile on the 21st floor. Two businesswomen in their 30s are sipping white wine and watching the last rays of the sun reflecting off the Andes. I sit a couple of stools over and when the bartender comes around, ask him to make me a terremoto.

He repeats the request. “A terremoto?”

The two businesswomen giggle.

“Yes, please,” I say. “A terremoto.”

The women cannot contain their laughter. The bartender, looking uncomfortable, gives them a quick glance.

“Sorry, sir,” he says, leaning in and lowering his voice. “We don’t make that drink here.”

“Ah,” I say. “And why is that?”

The two women are in stitches.

“No pineapple ice cream,” he whispers. The women are now laughing-crying.

“Of course,” I say. “Wrong season for pineapple ice cream. I forget it’s winter here.”

The bar man wipes his hands on his bar towel while looking down at a tub full of ice. “Perhaps a pisco sour?” he suggests.

“Perfect,” I say, “a pisco sour. And a round for the two ladies as well. On me.”

So now I’m curious. It seems, according to Inés, that one has not really been to Santiago unless one has had a terremoto cocktail. A drink these two Chilean businesswomen find hilarious. A drink I know nothing about. Except it seems to call for pineapple ice cream.

So begins my search for Chilean cuisine.

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How to make a perfect flat white

Friday, June 6, 2014 in Central Otago, New Zealand

flat white coffee

New Zealand’s favorite coffee drinks: a long black (top) and a flat white. Photo by David Lansing.

One of the things that has really surprised me about New Zealand is just how serious Kiwis are about their coffee. You can go to some tiny little café in the middle of the wop wops and almost invariably you’ll get a most excellent cup of coffee.

You see the photo up above? At the top is a long black and at the bottom is a flat white. This is pretty much what everyone in New Zealand orders. A long black is easy. It’s just a double shot of espresso topped with about four or five ounces of hot water (in other words, it’s like an Americano only stronger).

A flat white is a little more complicated. It’s related to the cappuccino and similar to a latte, but different. In general, a cappuccino is a single shot of espresso topped with very foamy milk. I’m not a big fan. I hate getting that mouthful of foamy nothingness before you get to the coffee (also, they’re usually served lukewarm, which I hate).

A latte can either be a single shot of espresso or a double but just to make the comparison with a flat white easier, let’s say it’s a double. So you pull a double shot and then you aerate your milk, making it not as foamy as you would for a cappuccino, and you pour that on top of the espresso shots. So you still need to sip through the milk foam to get to the espresso but there aren’t as many bubbles.

A flat white, on the other hand, is meant to integrate the shots of espresso with the hot milk. The key to making a great flat white is, one, stretch the milk with no bubbles and, two, integrate the stretched milk in to the espresso shots while keeping the crema on top. What you need to do is hold the coffee cup with the two shots of espresso at a slight angle while you gently pour the stretched milk on to the side of the cup. You want the milk to go under the crema but mix in with the coffee. You do this slowly and when the mixed coffee-hot milk mixture is almost to the top of the cup, you layer on the thick, smooth stretched milk cream on the very top. Now, when you take a sip, what you’re going to get is a nicely blended cup of espresso mixed in with the stretched milk. The perfect flat white.

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A glass of wine and then a dash to the airport

Thursday, June 5, 2014 in Central Otago, New Zealand

 

The group at Carrick Winery. We don’t look like we’re in a hurry, do we? Photo by David Lansing.

We’ve got a 4:30 flight from Queenstown and it’s already 3 but Justin and Casey want to make a quick stop at a winery nearby that they’ve heard about, Carrick. “Just five or ten minutes,” Justin says.

I don’t know. I’ve been to a hundred wineries and never got out of one yet in less than half an hour. Especially if you’re going to do a tasting, which we are. But what the hell. Adriena doesn’t seem worried and she’s in charge here.

And it is a joy to visit New Zealand wineries. Unlike their counterparts in California, which I’m most familiar with, you’ll seldom come across more than one or two other visitors anyplace you go. Carrick is no exception. In fact, except for the guy behind the bar, who we seem to have interrupted reading a book, we’re the only ones here.

We sample the pinot gris, the sauvignon blanc, and the chardonnay. I’m enjoying them very much but I’m also aware that it’s now 3:30 and, according to Adriena, it will take us at least half an hour to get to the airport, leaving us about 30 minutes to catch our flight. If we leave right this minute.

Which, of course, we don’t. Because we still have two wonderful pinot noirs to sample. Fifteen minutes later, we hustle to the car. But there is a lot of highway construction along the route. Someone states the obvious: “We’re never going to make it.”

Adriena makes a call. She tells someone at the airport to go over to the counter and tell them we’re running a little late but will be there shortly. We try not to laugh. I mean, it’s 4:20 now and we’re still not at the airport. And we have bags to check. For a 4:30 flight. Is she crazy?

But when we dash in to the terminal, the baggage handlers are ready for us. In two minutes everything is tagged and thrown on carts. Our tickets, already printed, are handed to us and we’re escorted through security. As I hurriedly rush up the stairs and on to the plane, a pretty flight attendant says, “We’ve been waiting for you.” Seems they actually did hold the flight.

Only in New Zealand.

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The Highlands Taxi ride

Wednesday, June 4, 2014 in Central Otago, New Zealand

 

There are car guys and then there’s me. I know nothing about cars. Not even the ones I own. My car has four doors and a pretty good radio and never seems to break down. That’s about all I can tell you about it.

So when Adriena told us we were going to stop off at the Highlands Motorsport Park in Cromwell to have a look at the cars in their museum and maybe take a spin in one of their high-powered vehicles—well, let’s just say I was the wrong audience. But, you know, when you’re with a group, you sometimes just have to go with the flow.

About this motorsport park: It’s like a Formula One track for amateurs. A 4.5km circuit full of hairpin turns, blah, blah, blah. I’m sure if you’re in to that sort of thing, you’d want to know all about it. But all I was wondering is when we were going to have lunch.

So we walk around the auto museum where, I’m sure, they had some neat cars, although I couldn’t tell you what they were, and then we all got to give their little go-kart track a spin, and finally they handed us serious race car helmets and took me and Michael and Paul for a ride in what they call their Highlands Taxi. Sounds innocuous enough, right? Except this “taxi” is a Porsche Cayenne Turbo (I only know that because I wrote it down) driven by a 19-year-old going 200kph.

Sound like fun? It wasn’t. To be honest, I thought I was going to throw up. And 200kph (about 120mph) isn’t all that fast in the race world. But I don’t think I’ve ever been in a car going over 80mph. And this one is being driven by a kid. Who keeps being asked questions by Michael, who was sitting up front. Michael wants to know if the car can roll (sure), if they’ve ever had an accident (not yet), and what would happen if a tire blew (let’s not talk about it).

Finally, I tell Michael to please stop asking the kid questions and just let him drive the damn car. Which he does. For maybe another five or six minutes. Which seemed like the longest five minutes of my life.

When we finally stopped, Justin and Casey were standing there smiling, waiting to go next. Casey, like me, is not a big car fan and hates things that go fast. So she was hesitant about even doing this. But she trusts me. “How was it?” she asked before getting in.

“It goes pretty fast,” I told her. And I wasn’t lying.

When she got out of the car at the end of her ride, the first thing she did was walk up to me and punch me in the arm. Hard. I suppose I deserved that.

 

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