got Pablo.
I’ve asked him to stick with Italian coffee, which pleased him down to the ground. Ha ha. Ground. Get it?
At least it’s starting to look more like a café than a boozer in here, with all the furniture painted in mismatched pastels and the chairs covered in flowered oilcloth (thanks to Mum). Out of respect for old Carl, Elsie and history, I’ve left the booths stripped back to the bare wood, but we ended up staining the ugly rough floorboards throughout. Now they look like ugly rough stained floorboards, but no one will notice as long as there’s lots of foot traffic.
‘Yo, am I late?’ Joseph calls as he saunters through the door in front of Lou. ‘It was ten o’clock, yeah? Wassup, I’m Joseph.’ He pumps Pablo’s hand. ‘You’re the coffee dude? Sick job, bruv.’
He’s still in his brother’s suit and tie, which makes it seem odd that he’s speaking like that and flicking air snaps at us.
‘Lou, Joseph, this is Pablo. He’s our coffee consultant.’ I’ve got to bite down my smirk as I say this, but, really, it’s a bit over the top, isn’t it?
‘How come you’re dressed like an undertaker?’ Lou asks Joseph, assessing him from beneath her blue fringe.
Joseph clearly doesn’t think much of Lou’s dress sense either. ‘Yo, this is how professional people dress. Take lessons from the master.’ He straightens the fat knot on his tie. ‘No-hopers need not apply.’
Lou doesn’t shift expression but shoves her hands into her sweatshirt pockets.
‘Besides, I dress like a professional because I’m the Professor,’ he says.
Lou scoffs. ‘You can’t give yourself a nickname, you muppet.’
‘Do you two know each other already?’ They shake their heads. ‘Really? Because I usually like to know someone for at least ten minutes before ripping into them. You can both wear whatever you want, as long as it’s clean and presentable.’
It’ll be hard enough training them without enforcing a dress code too. I don’t care if Joseph wants to look like an undertaker or a professor or a circus clown, frankly.
‘We can start whenever you’re ready,’ I tell Pablo.
He tears his eyes away from his reflection to say, ‘So now we begin. Today I will open your eyes and your hearts. You will learn to love the coffee, to speak its language, to listen as it whispers its secrets to you. It will dance for you, it will caress you, it will transport you to another world. There is a sacred bond between the barista and his machine. You love it and it will love you back. But only after you have mastered the bean. Today we begin the journey together.’ He aims his prayer hands at each of us and bows.
Lou’s mouth hangs open. ‘Mate, it’s only a hot drink.’
She sounds challenging, but I can see the flash of humour in her expression. I wonder how many people look that closely, though?
Pablo puts his hands over his heart. ‘It hurts me to hear these things. If you do not trust the process, the machine will not dance for you. It will not share its secrets. I cry for the bean.’
Puhlease. He’d never cry for the bean. He couldn’t stand the puffy eyes.
At two hundred quid for Pablo’s instruction, that machine had better dance for us. It doesn’t have to win Strictly, but it should at least give us a tango that would make Len Goodman proud.
Pablo steers us to the Gaggia. Its buttons, knobs and handles are just as intimidating as when I last looked at it. ‘Have you ever made coffee before?’ he asks.
Lou says, ‘Only instant. That Nescafé’s not bad.’
Pablo shudders for his whole culture. ‘I don’t mean…’ He closes his eyes in pain. ‘… freeze-dried coffee. I mean proper espresso. THIS is real coffee.’
With a dramatic wave of his hand – actually, you can assume everything Pablo does is going to be dramatic – he pulls several sacks of beans from his satchel. Looking faintly orgasmic as he inhales from the first sack, he says, ‘Smell the potential. Do you smell it?’
‘I smell it,’ Joseph says with a noisy sniff.
The beans do smell delicious, and I’m sure Pablo has a process, but I’m anxious to get to the part where coffee comes out of the little metal spout. We can’t serve our customers coffee smells.
But Pablo will not be rushed. He explains all about the proper grind, steam temperature and exactly how many grams of beans go into each shot. I’m starting to nod off when, finally, he wants us to touch the machine.
He demonstrates. ‘It is not that difficult,’ he says, grinding the beans. Then he spoons the grounds into the filter, levels it off and tamps it down. He does this all with the kind of precision that makes the space shuttle look easy to launch. And we haven’t even started on the milk yet.
We try copying him.
‘Like this?’
‘No, carina mia, like this.’
‘Like this?’
‘No, no, try again, like this.’
‘Like this?’
‘No, like this.’
‘Like this?’
‘No, like this!’
We go on (like this) for two hours. Pablo looks like he’s about to risk those puffy eyes having a little sob in the corner, but finally we manage to coax out something that tastes like espresso.
By the time Pablo leaves, we’ve made enough coffee to fuel an army marching into battle. He’s promised to return if we need him, like an over-caffeinated Nanny McPhee. And I get the feeling we will need him. I wouldn’t say the Gaggia and I are friends yet, but we’ve got a tentative understanding.
‘Well, that was fun,’ Lou says, shrugging into her sweatshirt. ‘Let’s be sure to do it again sometime.’ She pretends to stab herself in the tummy.
‘We aren’t finished yet,’ I say. ‘We have to practise. Don’t we want to be sure we can do it when we actually open?’
‘Yeah, Lou, don’t be so lazy,’ Joseph says. ‘I’m here for you, boss.’
‘You don’t have to call me boss.’
‘We can always keep some Nescafé out back,’ Lou suggests. ‘Honestly, it doesn’t taste bad.’
Don’t think I haven’t thought of that. ‘Hopefully we won’t need it. Lou, do you want to be the customer or the barista first? We’ll take turns taking the orders and making and serving the coffee. You remember how Pablo did it?’
‘I do!’ Joseph says. ‘I’ll go first. Can I? I can be first, yeah?’
Lou shrugs. ‘Knock yourself out.’
I’m intrigued
