CHARACTERS IN COFFEE
Q:
A:
Continued from page 37
Did you leave coffee at that point? What were you pursuing
for work?
TONY KONECNY/TONX.ORG
Yes, I was out of coffee from 1981 to the end of 1993.
I got a job restoring carousel animals for the city of
San Francisco, and I did that for a number of years. I moved up
to Sonoma County, which is about an hour drive north of San
Francisco. I wanted to raise organic vegetables, ride my bike on
the backroads and have a dog, and I did all that.
Q: A:
What brought you back to coffee?
I really missed serving people. To me, being a barista
is another form of being a chef—everything that's
involved in making a great cup of coffee takes as much skill as
making great cuisine. That really appealed to me, and I felt that
in Sonoma County there wasn't any wonderful coffee available so
there was an opening there. In 1993 my sister-in-law told me to
check out Coffee Fest Seattle; there were so many different coffees
being served there, but the one that stood out to me was from
David Schomer of Espresso Vivace. I saw him do a presentation and
tasted his coffee, and I liked that he has a scientific methodology
for making espresso. My father was a physician and my mom had
a master's degree in biology, so that scientific quotient appealed to
me. I visited his roastery and decided that when I opened up my
place in the Bay Area, I would become a Vivace wholesale account.
So in 1994 I opened the Western Café in the historic district of
Santa Rosa, and in 1996 I opened a second café in Santa Rosa called
Centro Espresso—a little cart inside of a newsstand.
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COFFEE ALMANAC • June 2013