Coffee, Cortados, and Cloud9
My favorite food pic, a trip down café memory lane, and reflections from getting older.
One of my resolutions this year was to get off coffee. I don’t remember many others, but the coffee one sticks out, probably because it was borne out of a serious concern for how much I relied on the espresso machines around work as a replacement for a healthy sleep schedule.
As much energy as I’ve gained from better sleep, it still hurts avoiding coffee after being around it most my life. A canister of Folgers instant coffee was always sure to be found in the cupboard above the toaster oven at home. Little powdery bits of who knows what — I didn’t care — turned into the most welcoming aroma, a scent which greeted me more days than not after getting home in high school. The trend continued in college, but I’m not too sure where most of the coffee I drank really came from. I guess back then I only cared that it was always readily available in the dining halls at the click of a button.1
The spring of ‘24, when graduation became an imminent threat to my college life, I thought hard about how to make those precious months between graduation and the start of my career a time to remember. It was one of my favorite things to think about on my daily walk past Ronald Reagan Medical Center to the campus I’d eventually say goodbye to. Eventually I figured being a barista could be a nice way to reunite with my community, see a new part of life, and get a few free drinks. Just one condition — it had to be at a local café. Didn’t think it’d be worth it at a chain.
Now, it’s been more than a year since I left my formal barista training. And it really was pretty serious — an initiation handbook explaining how a coffee tree’s country of origin and elevation affect the espresso’s flavor, diagrams of the different processes for getting a coffee bean out of the cherry,2 and a particular line about making sure the latté art we poured in every drink was Instagrammable. Genuinely, if this is the standard across all local cafés, I’ll never complain again about a latté going for $8. And, at that, I was always surprised just how many people tipped. Probably at least 30% by my estimate.
Somehow I never managed to get into tasting all those flavor notes that come labelled on a bag of nice espresso beans. They always seemed like a stretch, a marketing innovation, but I began sympathizing with their inspiration after internalizing just how much goes into producing a coffee bean. Besides, maybe it’s part of the appeal of going to a café these days. If you’ve ever wondered why the bag of African beans has so many fruity notes, what natural process means, or what makes the day’s blend a little sweeter than the last’s, the caring barista at your local shop is giddy waiting for you to ask.
Even so, I have to say one of the most ridiculous memories from training comes straight out of espresso tasting. My trainer pulled a shot, took a teaspoon, and swirled the espresso around before getting a spit-sized sip which he slurped so intensely I can only compare it to that animation of dementors sucking out someone’s soul from Harry Potter. Besides thinking it was a bit gross for our customers to hear — I’m hoping I was the only one around that had to see it — I thought it was a little extra. Maybe my palette really just isn’t refined enough to experience a good espresso for what it is.3
I could go on reliving life at the café, but I realize I still haven’t even mentioned Cloud9 Coffee, the place where I took that picture up there. Palo Alto, homeland to Cloud9, is quite a nice area. Next door to the café is an inconspicuous hangar for private mini-planes, a runway adorning the Bay just long enough for takeoff, and a little control tower that’s probably better staffed than their government sponsored counterparts at this point. I wonder which came first, the planes or the café name.
Across the street is a parking lot that might as well be the size of Costco’s. Even so, trying to find a spot here makes me hate driving. Seems like all the golfers in town came out for the sunny day to whip balls away at the driving range. Somehow I’m not surprised the most bustling range I’ve ever seen is in Palo Alto of all places.4
Getting to Cloud9 is worth every second. The café is what we baristas would call a Third Wave coffee shop. It feels snobby just writing that, but it’s a real phrase you pick up working at this type of place. I remember thinking at first “third-wave coffee” was just a nice way to say we served more elegant and thoughtful coffee than those heartless chains that have apps you can order on. But then I learned third-wave coffee meant that we celebrated the origin of the bean and thought about the entire journey from coffeeberry to cup. Really, the whole thing — growth, harvest, process, roast, all of it.
Per personal tradition, since it was my first time at Cloud9, I ordered a cortado, a very third-wave drink. Equal parts milk and espresso, cortados give a good way to gauge how a café pulls their shots. They’re much more balanced than lattés, and, thanks to their small size, come in more manageable cups. Plus, they don’t leave me feeling bloated the way lattés do with all that extra milk. Ironic considering I praised lattés as my favorite when asked during the barista interview what my go to drink at a café was. Back then, I didn’t even know what really went into a latté. And I sure as hell didn’t have the foresight to look at what else was on the menu.
Normally, I wouldn’t go so far out for coffee, but Cloud9 is special because of the people. A couple friends from work spend the better part of their weekend here serving up nice smells and good vibes. I don’t consider them coworkers because I have no idea what they actually do every day, and I don’t really care. All I know is we hang out and it’s a fun time.
The food this morning was free. Croffle? Free. Nutella? Banana? Strawberry? Cream? Maple syrup? Free, free, free, free, free. I’m lucky to have generous friends. On the house really means on them, but I find my ways to give back.
I felt so comfortable here taking pictures, moving around, sitting backwards against the bar while everyone else worked on the serious types of things Palo Alto’ians tend to busy up with. It’s crazy how cozy and familiar a new space can feel just knowing there’s a couple people around who I love. And that’s kinda been one of the best parts of growing up — knowing people in all corners of the world. One of my good friends who themselves is in optometry school put it best when she said, “I can’t believe I can say I have a friend that goes to Harvard Medical School.” Yeah, I can’t believe it either. But somehow, as we’ve grown up and grown our circle of people, we’ve so too unintentionally grown our realm of possibility along the way. I say unintentionally because I’m not the biggest fan of when people talk about networking or any other euphemism for getting to know people out of utility.
When my friends and I were younger, still in grade school, I never understood why the adults so firmly believed in our future. It seemed like their hopes were mismatched with the confidence we had in ourselves, an incongruence which itself only depressed our confidence even more. But now that we’re a bit older and more aware, I think I understand why. Part of it is just the raw hope of life, I’m sure. Manifesting, as they say. But more than that, now I see so many of my closest friends doing great — working a job they enjoy that simultaneously affords them the time and resources to enjoy life, pursuing their passions in grad school, chasing startup dreams, doing cool research I can genuinely see benefiting the world, getting into med school, doing PhDs, going for MD PhDs… these things are all suddenly normal.5 And it’s this normalness that makes what felt so outlandish in years past seem so much more achievable.
It’s a shame this perspective only comes with lots of time. But now I have context for what goes into making these things happen, and sure, while I don’t understand through personally lived experience how they get done, I know enough to be confident that my friends going down these paths will do a hell of a good job. I often tell one of my research tech friends that if she could see herself the way I and most everyone else around her does, she would understand why we’re so confident in her future while she isn’t so sure herself.
It seems like one of the reasons we aren’t so confident in ourselves while figuring things out is the lack of context we have for how people find their way through the world. There’s so much to figure out, and we’re limited by factors we aren’t even aware of. A Chinese phrase, 井底之蛙 (literally, a frog at the bottom of a well), comes to mind. The phrase references a story about a frog living at the bottom of a well who doesn’t know there’s an entire world outside of its happy little well. We’re all sort of like that, I guess, but I think the height of our wells can be chipped down by any good mentor faster than it’d be by time. It’s just that finding a good mentor is not such an easy problem to solve, and that really doesn’t seem to change at any stage of life.
I think I’ve only recently truly realized how important mentorship can6 be — in these career pursuits just as much as at the café or anywhere else. I mentioned I have a couple friends who work at Cloud9. One of them was working POS7 when I first walked in, and I asked if he ever makes the drinks.
“No, they don’t let me. I’m not good enough.”
He sighed with the sort of resigned laugh accepting defeat, and I laughed with him. But I’m sure with some time, practice, and good mentorship, he’ll be behind the counter, grinding8, tamping, pulling, and pouring just as well as all the others.
I feel like I should end this with a nice shot of the cortado I sipped away last weekend, but I didn’t have the foresight for that either. I guess it’d also seem poetic if I said I wrote all this at the café, but that’d be a lie. So ‘till next time it is.
That is, after the 8 people in front of me finished getting theirs.
which seems like an obvious step now but was wild to think about at a time I didn’t even know coffee grew in fruit
Max gaslighting.
This might be an insane statement for the regular golfers reading this. Sorry, I’ve only been to like 2 driving ranges.
You can probably tell a lot of my good friends come from the research world. Please send funding.
“Can,” since a lot of effort goes into both sides of any mentorship to make it truly beneficial.
Point of Sale, or colloquially, the register.
Beans, not working hard, which he already does.
you need to figure out how to put this into a tiktok that was a longgg read
u do be the reason i do any reading these days