Cappucco? No prego.

This week I will be commemorating 7 months since I moved to the bay area.

Life has been mostly splendid here, with sunny days, polite people, mostly-functional public services system (10 months to pass a budget? Com'on), and very bad coffee.

Coffee here is so ridiculously bad that I actually thought about starting to prepare my own coffee. (If you've ever had me make you coffee you would know I make horrible coffee).

I was not much of a coffee drinker until the age of 21, and then I had my first Cappuccino in Italy. To my delight, I found it wasn't me who had a problem with coffee, it was Nescafe (or the local Israeli brand), which was problematic.

I became very fond of Cappuccinos, and strong black Arabic coffee (Calling it "Turkish" is just wrong...Turks drink mostly tea) with Cardamom.

A coffee snob indeed.

Whenever someone hears me complaining about coffee, the typical question is, "what's so wrong with Starbucks", or, if encountering the upper scale connoisseur wannabe "isn't Pete's just like in Italy"?

Well, it isn't, and for all those who asked, here's Ron's guide on how to ruin an expensive cup of Cappuccino in 7 simple steps:

1. Roasting - roast the coffee too much. Bitterness is not the goal, it's burntness. Try to keep as much as possible with the old American tradition of bad brewed coffee. I have heard several nicknames for brewed coffee. I am mostly fond with "sock juice", but "gutter juice" makes the cut as well.

2. Milk - when steaming the milk, make sure to heat it too much, beyond the desired 70 centigrade temperature. Heating the milk too much will achieve two of the most desired American coffee goals - you will burn out any relic of flavor remaining in the roasted grains, and you will present the drinker with an exquisite burnt tongue sensation gift.

3. The cup - make sure to use an oversize cup. The locals here like their coffee as close to American cars as possible - large and of low quality. Quoting a friend who interviewed an Israeli entrepreneur once, "Israelis do not drink their coffee in buckets".

4. The cup #2 - Always serve your coffee in carton cups. This will allow you to transfer the warm (too hot) feeling to the cup holder, and will give a sense of urgency to leave the coffee shop - it is a well known fact that coffee should only be sipped a mile away from where it was poured.

5. A tea spoon - just don't invent those. Give your clientele disposable (organic compostable, of course) spoons, or better yet, small wooden stirrers. Since you steamed the milk too hot anyway, why would they like to endure on the best part of the Cappuccino - the leftover mix of foam, coffee and sugar.

6. Sugar - Assume no one uses it, and offer a variety of five (yes, 5!) types of low calorie sweeteners. Can anyone please tell me what's the difference between the pink, yellow, orange, blue and green ones? If I mix them, will it taste like m&m's in my coffee?

7. Sugar #2 - Try not to serve brown sugar. If the customers insist (those nasty snobs), serve "sugar in the raw" in a large open bowl, making sure it absorbs as much humidity as possible and sticks into large lumps. Coffee drinkers are known to be aggressive people and the best way to let them get rid of those aggressions is let them pound into bowls of sugar until they can get a teaspoon full of sugar in their cup. I have a one word hint for you: Demerara

So, let's suppose someone drop you in the bay area, and for some reason you insist on getting a good cup of coffee, where would that be?

Here's a short list of where not to go:

1. Blue Bottle Bar(s) - This famed coffee company is the hottest "best" place in town. I have tried them 3 times in 2 branches. If you like your coffee burnt (but being served by someone who looks like a model), try the Mint alley branch in San Francisco. If you like it just burnt and standing in line 10 minutes for it, try the Hayes Valley branch.
2. Any Starbucks branch - the coffee is just bad.
3. Cafe Strada in Berkeley - The terrace is nice on a sunny day. The coffee is always awful.

Where should you go:

1. Yali's Cafe at Berkeley (both the university and the town) - Owned by a Kibutznik, he makes sure to teach his employees how to make coffee. And at the UC campus they're all perky smiling students - what could be better?
2. Cafe Del Doge in Palo Alto - this one realy tastes like in Italy. No wonder all Israeli VCs hang out there.
3. Pete's - If you insist on Pete's, ask for a "traditional cappuccino" (no, it's not on the menu). Apparently the insiders know how to say "I know what good coffee is like" in Americanese.

- Ron

Rak Hayom! Rak Hayom!

Yes – I did disappear, and No – nothing bad has happened to me.

I am alive, and kicking all sorts of equilibrium problems. According to the UC Berkeley Economics department, you have not been through a real Zubur unless you’ve been applying the implicit function theorem on anything you can, in very explicit ways.

You would never imagine what Google images brings up when you look for "zubur"

(Anyone can suggest a good word for a “Zubur” in English?).

Seems like the best equilibrium I could find is writing this post at 2:29AM.

Kind of reminds me of undergraduate years, only without the uniform and the pool table.

But, tiny issues aside, I’d like to touch on a very important topic of marketing in this post – variety, and how it affects consumers. In my case, it’s very simple – it makes me terrified, it paralyzes me and makes me unable to decide.

I don’t get the fixation with variety here. The question isn’t of quality; it’s of amounts,

Quantities, Selection and Volume – The more, the merrier.

Comcast’s strongest selling point here is that they have more HD cannels than their competitor.
Does showing Law & Order in 100 channels instead of 90 make viewers happier?

Here’s a simple example of one of my favorite choices of a major food group – tomatoes (the others being beef and chocolate, in case you were wondering).

The choice is simple among Regular, Organic, Certified Fair Trade, Zero Emission, Heirloom and Certified Picked by Free Range Leprechauns tomatoes.

$5 per one, and believe me, it's after a discount

The ice cream aisle in my local Safeway is much larger than my apartment – and don’t get me started on the options for tortillas or cereal - I once even had to use a GPS to navigate out of the cereal aisle…

But, as always, something is rotten here.

The problem is, as a matter of fact, that things do not get rotten here for suspiciously long times.

Have you ever seen a lettuce that looks as fresh after 4 weeks (yes, four) as it looked the day it was bought? Would you trust an apple to be good after 3 weeks? A banana after 5?

All these are simple examples of how the truths of life change:

• If it looks fresh, it will be cheap, is probably 3 weeks old and made of plastic.

• If it looks half rotten, it’s probably organic, 2 days old, and you must eat it immediately or it dies within a day, but – it will make you healthy. The price, though, would be $5 per pound.

As a finishing point, I’d like to share with you a key finding in my latest research.

Based on a very biased research, which is extremely unscientific, I have reached an eye-opening flabbergasting conclusion – Americans do not cover their mouth when they yawn.

The only reasoning I could find for this phenomenon is that Americans want to boast the fact they can afford dental insurance, but who knows…

- Ron