This weekend, a Salt & Straw collaboration resulted in the nation’s first-of-its-kind Affogato Bar. This is the second of back-to-back brick and mortar projects with Portland ties highlighting the ongoing importance of cooperation, flavor pairing and focus on origin.
Salt & Straw, the culinary ice creamery whose three Portland locations and one Los Angeles outpost seem to elicit record line lengths no matter what the weather, partnered with Jerad and Justin Morrison of San Francisco’s Sightglass Coffee to create the new affogato (espresso with ice cream) emporium housed on the mezzanine level of Sightglass’s flagship SoMa café and roastery near downtown San Francisco. The new shop, which kicked things off with free affogatos on Friday, offers a mix-and-match menu featuring three specialty espressos alongside three unique ice cream flavors, all of which will rotate seasonally.
Every one of the nine potential pairings is designed to let customers experience unexpected flavor combinations that nevertheless complement each other flawlessly. While Salt & Straw has earned its fame through these sorts of combinations (pear and blue cheese ice cream, anyone?), creating (for instance) a Blood Orange Olive Oil ice cream expected to complement three distinct espressos adds a new layer of difficulty.
“We found the challenge of developing special ice cream flavors that would pair in a totally unique way with different coffees really intriguing,” says Kim Malek, who founded Salt & Straw with cousin Tyler Malek in 2011. The two have worked exclusively with Bay Area artisans to produce the new flavors for the affogato project.
The venture comes hardly a month after the long-anticipated opening of a similar coffee-pairing concept in Cup & Bar, the coffee and chocolate tasting room from Trailhead Coffee Roasters and Ranger Chocolate located in Portland’s recently conceptualized Central Eastside “Artisan Quarter.” There, every coffee drink is paired with a piece of single-origin chocolate; café novelties like chocolate soda and chocolate milk (as well as affogatos) claim menu space and both the roastery and chocolaterie operate on the premises.
Both collaborations are designed to stay true to origin (Salt & Straw focusing on Bay Area flavors and local cream, Sightglass, Trailhead and Ranger communicating the terroir of their coffee and cacao through many single-origin expressions) while at the same time opening the door to new flavor phenomena through combinations not available anywhere else. That said, the collaborations also reflect an ever-growing number of small-scale producers’ constant search for shelf space and the funding to continue their crafts.
As these pressures intensify in a region rife with exceptional craft cuisine and coffee, are collaborations like these the future of artisan gastronomy? With affogato bars and coffee-chocolate tasting rooms as harbingers, we can certainly hope so.
