Month: March 2014

I spent all of January getting everything in order to open a serious cocktail bar Downtown. Several weeks went into researching what the business’s official and exact position on ice, shaking, dilution, stirring, double straining, etc. should be. I spent another several days discussing this with our staff and figuring out specifically how to implement those wrought conclusions. Yet at home, on my kitchen counter stands an automatic coffee maker and a Krups grinder. In the face of my devotion to cocktails, my inattention to coffee was starting to haunt me.

One of my best bros has a tattoo of an Italian espresso pot on his arm and likes to point out how with cocktails and not coffee, I proverbially strain a gnat then swallow a camel. “You’ve got to get a burr grinder, dude.” Whatever, I thought. My unevenly ground automatic coffee adequately catapults me into a caffeinated state that quickly starts my day.

Feeling rather sheepish about how much I know about booze and how little I know about coffee, I called my old friend Nick Leichentritt, hoping to stage—work for free in exchange for a technique lesson—at his Downtown coffee shop Milli Joe. Leichentritt and I worked together at Escafé about seven years ago, during his UVA years. When he took an insurance job in Virginia Beach, I was certain our paths wouldn’t cross in a significant way in the future. Much to my surprise, a few years later he announced his plan to abandon his 9 to 5 and move back to C’ville to start a serious coffee shop.

When I mentioned the idea of staging at Milli Joe and writing an article about “All the things bartenders don’t know about coffee,” he looked at me and, without missing a beat, said no.

“That won’t work,” he said. “There are just too many things I’d want you to know before you ever touched someone’s coffee.”

In that moment, I realized why Leichentritt’s café, despite being surrounded by a host of bustling and successful coffee shops —Shenandoah Joe’s, Mudhouse, C’ville Coffee, Café Calvino, and Java Java, to name a few—was such a hit: Leichentritt is really flipping serious about every last detail of your cup of coffee. My disappointment about being denied the stage was mitigated slightly as I realized Leichentritt and I were kindred spirits in different fields. (Although I couldn’t help but think that he viewed me as the equivalent of a light beer drinker when it comes to coffee.) I sat down with Leichentritt to find out what everyone who aspires to drink coffee seriously ought to know, and what makes an undeniably delicious cup of coffee.

C-VILLE Weekly: I got denied a “stage” at Milli Joe. What kind of experience do the people handling your coffee have? 

Nick Leichentritt: All of our current baristas came to Milli Joe with some coffee experience. Two of us have been formally trained at the American Barista Coffee School in Portland, Oregon, two were professional coffee roasters, and one was the head of the specialty foods department and a coffee buyer for a major grocery chain. Just about all of us have had previous barista experience. Learning coffee takes quite some time.

Is there a single most important aspect of making a good shot of espresso or cup of coffee? 

Banning automation from Milli Joe. With every step you automate you pull the barista just a little farther away from their craft. Making a great shot is a highly nuanced art requiring the full attention of a professional eye. A skilled barista can make small changes to the dose (amount of ground coffee used), coarseness of grind, and shot time to coax the best flavors out of the coffee—something automatic machines that use time or water volumes to stop shots will always struggle to do consistently. You want your barista to be as connected to the coffee as possible. It’s more fun for us, and it will taste better to you.

What equipment/techniques would you recommend for the home barista trying to make a solid cup of coffee?

The most important tool is a quality grinder. I often see people go all out on expensive home espresso machines and expensive coffee, and skimp on grind using a cheap, Wal-
mart blade grinder. A good quality burr grinder will have the greatest impact on the quality of home brewed coffee; an even, controllable, and consistent grind is key. I always recommend one of the Baratza line grinders. They have professional quality precision scaled down for low volume home use. I have even seen some of them used by professionals who work with small volumes of coffee.

What are some of the more unusual or fun pieces of equipment you have at your shop? When and why do you employ them?

The halogen heat lamp siphon bar is quick to grab your attention, looking like some kind of “Breaking Bad” set up or science project. It is an old method designed in the 1860s by a French inventor. It is slow coffee, taking five minutes or so, but it’s well worth the wait. Once the water boils, a vacuum is created, which siphons water from the bottom chamber up to the top. We then add ground, single-origin coffees, and let it brew immersion-style (meaning the coffee sits in the hot water), creating a similar flavor profile to a French press, just without that muddy mouth feel. The big oily flavors are not only detectable on your palate, but also actually visible to the naked eye. Try a cup and you will see a coating of flavor packed coffee oils on the top of your cup.

India is home to more than 1.2 billion people, with 28 distinct states, each with its own history of diverse cultural influences. Yet, here in the U.S., we have a single term for the entire country’s cuisine. As in: “Honey, do you feel like Indian food tonight or Greek?”

To be fair, restaurants in the U.S. don’t make it easy to explore India’s food. Much like so-called Chinese restaurants here, Indian ones can have remarkably similar menus. It’s as if a nation with one sixth of the world’s population subsists on nothing more than chicken tikka masala, samosas, and a handful of other dishes.

No one knows for sure how this came to be. Part of the cause is likely imitation. Many early Indian restaurants in the U.S. featured the rich cuisines of Northern India’s regions, particularly Punjab. The success of those restaurants spawned others, and then still others, such that Punjabi cuisine came to dominate Indian restaurants throughout the U.S.

The story of Charanjeet Ghotra, owner of Milan restaurant, is illustrative. A Punjab native, Ghotra came to the U.S. in 1996, at the age of 20, with the American dream in mind. He began working at a Long Island restaurant owned by some Punjabi family friends, who soon sent him to Virginia Beach to manage another restaurant they owned, called Nawab.

After several years at Nawab, Ghotra and co-worker Jaswinder Singh decided it was time to open their own place, hoping to replicate Nawab’s success elsewhere in Virginia. A statewide search led them to Lynchburg, where they opened Milan in 2002. The next year, they brought the concept and menu to Charlottesville, and opened the Milan on Route 29 North. (Pronounced like Bob Dylan’s last name, it is a Hindi word for meeting place, not to be confused with the city in Italy.) Nawab was their model.

“We knew something that was working,” said Ghotra.

Thus, Milan’s menu, like Nawab’s, is filled with popular Punjabi dishes. But, unlike a lot of other Indian restaurants, Milan branches out to cuisines outside the borders of Northern India.

Specialties of both Punjab and other regions were part of a recent feast I enjoyed at Milan with close friends Drs. Bobby and Sandhya Chhabra. The Chhabras grew up eating Indian food, and, naturally, both consider their mothers to be among the best cooks they know. They also happen to love the food at Milan, and their mothers do, too.

“Milan reminds me of my mom’s cooking,” said Bobby Chhabra. “[It] is very nostalgic for me.”

This is high praise. As is the approval of two other experts who joined us at the table, the Chhabras’ children: Vijay, 12, and Vaya 10. Echoing her father, Vaya said that eating at Milan makes her feel like she’s in India.

Testimony to the quality and breadth of Milan’s food is that almost everyone present had a different favorite dish, with several diverging from standard Punjabi fare. Vaya’s choice, for example, was a South Indian dish called Chicken 65, an appetizer of fried chicken nuggets in a spicy red paste that is said to have been created in 1965 by a famous Chennai restaurant.

Vijay was partial to an off-menu item: “lamb chilli fry,” a fiery Indo-Chinese concoction in which soy sauce adds an unexpected twist. Their mother, meanwhile, loves the lasooni gobhi, a garlicky starter of fried cauliflower in a tomato-based sauce. And their father’s go-to dish is lamb vindaloo, the intense takeout standby that he finds “addictive.”

Ghotra’s own personal favorite, the scallop patia—a sweet and sour curry with mangoes and ginger—was a huge hit with our group. Also swoon-worthy was an exotic coastal shrimp curry, a Western Indian dish, as well as Punjabi standards like tandoori meats, dal makhani, and fluffy, charred naan.  And, I was thrilled to find that our meal included the one dish I order at Milan more than any other: hara bhara kebab, a spiced vegetable patty of potatoes and spinach, with sweet tamarind chutney for dipping.

To test the breadth of Milan’s appeal, I brought along two of the least sophisticated, Caucasian friends I could find. And, they loved it too. In fact, according to Ghotra, the vast majority of Milan’s regular customers are not from India, as the Indian community in Charlottesville is not significantly large. Among the regulars, the ubiquitous chicken tikka masala is the most popular dish, and understandably so—the chicken tikka masala fiend to whom I am married considers it among the best versions she has had.

Also popular is the daily lunch buffet, a good deal at $8.95 during the week and $9.95 on weekends. But, after my recent meal, I have to say that the best way to eat at Milan is to come at dinnertime with a group of good friends; sit back, relax, and allow the restaurant to create you a feast. As long as they include hara bhara kebab.