Faemina

Coffee central: the Faemina, with (beyond it) the coffee roaster and grinder

Eastside Road, October 10, 2012—

TODAY IS FAST DAY, typically Tuesday, when we have our usual Spartan breakfast, then nothing until a handful of almonds and cashews with tea in the evening.

But breakfast this morning, ah, breakfast! The Faemina is back from the shop!

Lindsey found the Faemina in the middle 1960s in a second-hand shop — remember those? — on Grove Street in Berkeley. We borrowed twelve bucks from Mom, put thirteen of our own with it, and bought the machine, which was brand new, still sporting its European plug. Our old friend George Craig replaced the plug, and we've used it ever since. Over the years it's needed gaskets from time to time, and once it needed something more: on that occasion I actually shipped it to New York for refurbishment, and it returned lacking some of its parts and, while working, not really working quite the same.

Last month it stopped working, and I suspected the heating elements had given out. I'd had to replace switches on it twice — you see one on the base; there's another, similar, on the other side — and my wiring was largely guesswork. The switches had been arcing, and now and then you smelled hot insulation on the wires. Time to take it to the shop.

I took it to my old friend Mr Espresso in Oakland. Soon came discouraging news: the elements were burned out and needed replacing. Much research on line. Then, just when I'd found someone back east who'd supply brand-new handmade replacements, at a hefty though honest price, happier news from Oakland: after removal, clean-up, and reinstallation, and complete rewiring, Faemina was as good as new.

Well, not quite, of course. There's some play in the lever: in fifty years, moving metal parts inevitably wear down a bit. Some of the chrome plating is showing its age, too.

But the machine works. We have our caffelattes again, after weeks of substitutes from our daughter's Atomic, and one or another Moka from the top shelf, and even a cheap plastic Krups fake espresso maker we bought years ago for use in a rented vacation house.

Ah, Faemina, how fond we are of you! How grateful for these long years of devotion! I promise to take good care of you…

End of road trip

Eastside Road, April 24—

SUPPER AT HOME tonight, first time in a week. A pleasure, and a simple one: a couple of eggs fried softly in olive oil, an English muffin.

The day had begun in the town of Atascadero, which in fact has a pretty good café, where we had our first edgy Stumptown espresso in quite a long time — a powerful Portland roast that always reminds me of the early days of espresso in this country, at the old Piccolo Espresso on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue, back in the 1960s.

Lunch: a BLT in a bleak but trendy-looking restaurant in King City, before the beautiful drive up Highway 25. Bacon lettuce and tomato qualifies as Elective Affinity and very nearly, but not quite, for Hundred Plates. With it, a glass of rather sweet Californa Riesling.

Mid-afternoon we stopped for the best coffee of the trip, in a café we'd discovered a year ago in San Juan Bautista. They roast their own coffee here, and except for the coffee I roast myself — Monkey Blend from Sweet Maria's, roasted to a Full City — the coffee here, coincidentally named Mountain Monk, is the best I know.

But the best meal of the day was the one at home, eggs from a neighbor's hens, English muffins from the Downtown Bakery. Life is good. Tomorrow we fast.

Cheap Pinot grigio

• Brū, 5760 El Camino Real, Atascadero; (805) 464-5007
• KC Bar & Grill, 200 Broadway Street, King City; 831-386-9006
• Vertigo Coffee, 81 Fourth Street, San Juan Bautista; 831 623-9533