Cup Speciality Coffee

Cup Speciality Coffee

The coffee leaves your scalp tingling, and the simple but stellar food subsequently soothes you like a felt blanket in a winter night; Cup Speciality Coffee @ West End is all about unpretentious perfection - a true sign of greatness.

* Palate: 9/10 * Wallet: 8/10 * Coffee: 10/10 * Benchmark: THIS IS IT *

Kitchen Eaten deliberately start this blog with one of his favourite joint.

Cup Speciality Coffee is a converted warehouse located off West End's commercial hub. The establishment is frequented by the sophisticated, the ridiculously good-looking and the hip; in short, the crowd here mirrors the Slayer espresso machine, which is in turn a statement of intent: this place is serious about coffee.

In contrast to the crowd, Kitchen Eaten is complicated, ridiculous looking and has a sore hip from the gym. Nonetheless, he finds himself seated in this establishment with Apprentice Chef, with growling stomach, wagging tongue and twitching nose. 

The crew here is too cool and too friendly to frown at Kitchen Eaten. 

And so it begins.

The Slayer

Coffee

Kitchen Eaten and Apprentice Chef were both charmed by the magical flat white (on this occasion, made from the daily five star blend coffee bean) that the crew here seems to deliver with such care, quality and consistency. 

The dense glistening sheen of silk that is the foam sitting atop the coffee bodes well and begs for some caressing. With the tongue. The coffee is warm to the touch, but not so hot that one fears for the integrity of the milk. The contrast in colours points to a bold coffee extraction, but the nose reassures that nothing is burnt/over-extracted. In Kitchen Eaten's mouth, the spike of the bold extraction expresses itself in a thick bitter-sweet envelope that coats the tongue, and subsequently transitions seamlessly into the silky embrace of the milk. The respective sweets of the coffee and the milk perfectly links the 2 components together; none of that irritating bitter intermission, and none of that sinking feeling when you realise the creaminess of the milk is destroyed by excessive temperature and now taste like powder and water. 

The crew has successfully expressed themselves in a simple cup of coffee, even to the untrained palate of Kitchen Eaten. And the angels sing.

A cup of coffee like this makes one ponder about all the attention that goes into the whole process: the source of the beans, the roasting of the bean, the grind size of the bean, the pressure, the temperature and the duration of the Slayer, the temperature of the milk, the fat and protein content of the milk (by the way, Maleny guernsey used here), etc. Every little step an experiment that the crew here controls, every little variable considered, and every little permutation investigated, and all of that to sell to the crowd a cup of perfection for under $4.

And Kitchen Eaten overheard someone saying that the caramel latte in Starbucks is better. He considered steaming the punter's nose cavity with the milk steamer, but his hips impeded his movement. Lucky day for the steamer.

By the way, Apprentice Chef was too busy purring at every aspect of the coffee, but surely she concurs.

The contrast - you know it is going to be good

Palate

The food here is necessarily simple - small menu, small prep counter, big coffee - but the attention to details turns simple into unpretentious perfection.

Case in point is Kitchen Eaten's fried egg on toast. The presentation is nonchalant but elegant, in keeping with the general feel of the place. Kitchen Eaten suspects that the crew works very hard to cultivate the I-never-did-care-it-just-happened-to-be-perfect feel. The toast comes spread with a thin layer of sweet mascarpone, is beautifully crisp and brown on the outside, and is chewy on the inside; the leavened structure ensures that it is not overly dense, and yet the taste of the flour pokes through. Perfect texture and perfect taste. The egg: high quality stuff with dense indigo yolk, warm, still runny, and finished with a sprinkle of dukkah. Kitchen Eaten's definition of a good fried egg comes with a slight bubbling of the white around the edges. The fried egg here ticks all the boxes.

Kitchen Eaten dug in, and the crisp chewiness of the bread, the nuttiness of the dukkah, the savoury goo goodness of the egg and the sweet creaminess of the mascarpone complements each other beautifully. 

Symphony in the taste bud.

Fried egg on toast

The winner of the day, however, is Apprentice Chef's creamed corn on toast. Each individual corn kernel is perfection; still juicy, still bouncy to the bite, but cooked through. The corn is lightly creamed to add a hint of richness to the bouncy corn kernels, but restrained enough to avoid death-by-creaminess. To add a further level of intrigue, the cream is lightly spiced to pleasantly surprised the taste bud. The sweet bias of the dish is balanced beautifully with thin slices of prosciutto. All of that plus the perfect toast? Yes sir.

Creamed corn and prosciutto on toast

If Kitchen Eaten and Apprentice Chef are to be picky, they'd say that the spinach garnish could use a thin sheen of olive oil to improve the look. But it is exactly that - being picky.

Kitchen Eaten and Apprentice Chef both prefers simple but sumptuous fares like these over complicated, ambitious but poorly executed fancy dishes.  Kitchen Eaten reckons that the food is the Paul Giamatti equivalent of this establishment - unglamorous, but definitely good enough to star on its own, and adds so much more to the place in a supporting role with its sheer quality.

At this point, Kitchen Eaten ordered a piccolo to fantasise about Paul Giamatti.

Apprentice Chef lost her ability to communicate. She continued to purr, but surely she concurs.

Wallet

$20 for a full tummy and 2 amazing coffees. The price is dead set average among the Brisbane scene, and hence a steal at this quality. 

Massive value.



You want to eat?

Everyone deserves to have coffee that takes their breath away. 


If understated perfection appeals to you, this place is for you.


Eat here.

Links

• What you get at Cup every time
• Cup Speciality Coffee Home
• This is where it's at