Perfection in Every Cup

Macchiato at Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea-Los Angeles

I am in love with the macchiatos at Intelligentsia! The expresso with milk is to die for. It is very strong, but good. Intelligentsia Coffee’s mission is to provide their customers, staff, and community with an unparalleled and complete coffee and tea experience.

Intelligentsia started more than a decade ago when Doug Zell and Emily Mange left San Francisco to open an in-store coffee roaster-retailer on Broadway Avenue on the north side of Chicago. At that time they were simply hoping to bring great, fresh-roasted coffee to their own coffeebar. Since then this has all evolved to a place they never could have imagined.

Intelligentsia now has three great cities to call home: Chicago—a city that is brooding, practical and reluctantly beautiful; Los Angeles—a city that views creativity as a birthright, is immensely vast, decidedly impractical and equally messy and marvelous; and New York—a city of paradoxes, hulking but chock full of intimate corners, timeless but achingly current, polished but decaying, worldly yet oddly provincial, all crashing together in perfect cacophony (or is it harmony?).

I think that coffee lovers need to try Intelligentsia. The service and quality of the coffee is pretty exceptional. I don't drink coffee often, but when I do I love a good cup of coffee. I usually prefer a latte or macchiato. However, I never knew the difference until recently...

The word “latte” is Italian for milk and naturally, in Italy, caffelatte is used to describe coffee mixed with milk. In other countries nowadays, particularly English-speaking ones, use the term latte to indicate a certain kind of coffee. In Italy, ordering latte will make the server give you a cup of milk and no coffee included obviously.

Macchiato is also an Italian word meaning, ìmarkedî or ìspottedî. Caffe Macchiato therefore, literally means ìmarked coffeeî. Originally, this came to happen because people ordering espressos want some milk on it. Serving waiters find it difficult to determine which is which since coffee, with or without small amounts of milk, looks just the same. The espresso with milk is then marked (macchiato) for easier recognition.

Macchiato, as an American invention, is typically added with foam, which in turn, confused a lot of people that the meaning of macchiato is îfoamî and foam is the actual marking agent in caffe macchiato. In truth, the original marker is simply steamed milk, nothing else. The caffe macchiato has evolved with the help of business marketing along with other factors.

Facts about macchiato and latte:
Latte, in Italian, means milk while Macchiato means marked or spotted. Latte is basically coffee and milk, Macchiato is coffee with milk but the milk is added as a visible mark. Latte, essentially refers to the ingredient of the drink while macchiato refers to the appearance of the drink. The ìnewî latte is served with milk on top of the espresso while the ìnewî macchiato is served with the espresso on top of milk.

xoxo,
Kat