So I finally made it over to the Blue Bottle Cafe. It's a strangely exhilarating experience, as the old-fashioned burnished hominess of the coffeehouse has been turned into a post-modern coffee laboratory. With all the beakers, tubes and flashing lights, the cafe is just a few caged rats short of being a place I could imagine producing prescription mood drugs.




But coffee is a bit of a mood drug itself, and the steaming cups I had were as delicious as the Japanese siphon system (the first in the US) was perplexing. The coffee is indeed good, but the show is even better.