As we head into Thanksgiving, Y&H wants to help you eat like a pilgrim (a Native American, too, because we’re all about equal opportunity eating here). In other words, we want to help you eat locally for the holiday. Almost 400 years ago, the pilgrims had no choice but to eat local. These days, we do. But it’s not easy.

Like with breads, you can never truly buy local coffee. Most of the beans are grown in Latin America, Africa, or Southeast Asia. But you can buy locally roasted coffee, like the stuff at Qualia Coffee on Georgia Avenue NW (202-248-6423), where owner Joel Finkelstein roasts beans six days a week.

Try Finkelstein’s Ugandan Bugisu beans, which should provide a rich, somewhat sweet coffee to go with your dessert. Or check out Qualia’s latest import, the India Kaapi Royale beans, which you can grind with a cardamom pod and steep with cinnamon and cloves, all of which should give you a sweet and exotic cup of Joe to go with your final course of pie.

We in the District and beyond are enjoying the finest coffee we’ve ever known, and it’s coming from all sides and in different forms.

You have shops like Misha’s, M.E. Swing,  Sidamo, and the relative newcomer, Qualia on Georgia Avenue, which all roast and sometimes blend their own coffees. Then you have operations like Peregrine, Chinatown Coffee Co., and Mid City Caffe, and DeJaBel, which all buy quality, freshly roasted coffees from wholesalers like Counter Culture and Intelligentsia. There’s even Shagga Coffee and Restaurant, which has created its own blend through Caffe Pronto in Annapolis.

Wow, who needs another cup of Joe?

Metro Connection host David Furst and I will discuss D.C.’s sudden explosion of gourmet coffee shops and break down the best of the new crop of caffeine slingers. You can hear our discussion today at 1 p.m. on WAMU, 88.5 FM.

It will be replayed at 5 a.m. on Saturday. You will definitely need some coffee if you’re going to listen at that hour.

Let me tell you how the Hill Rag, a free monthly, cost me $2 this morning.

I stopped on the Hill today to eat breakfast and buy a cup of Joe from my current favorite, Peregrine Espresso, located in the former Murky Coffee spot, site of the late unpleasantness. I ordered a to-go cup made from beans imported from Burundi, a country better known for its ethnic violence and its brain-numbing level of poverty. Coffee exports, it seems, have given this poorer-than-dirt-poor country some hope. (Just don’t tell that to the women during bean-picking season.)

Economic hope and the morality of supporting abusive coffee pickers were the furthest things from my mind, however, when I ordered my coffee. Instead, I was daydreaming about the flavors packed into this caramel-colored liquid. Peregrine’s sign, perched on the counter next to the ordering station, informed me that Burundi “Bwayi” coffee boasts notes of lemon and figs and other flavors I can’t now remember.  I just remember how happy I was to try a new coffee, even at $2-plus for a rather small cup.

I stood there at the counter as the barista ground the beans and placed them into a fresh filter. She then pulled hot water from a heating unit set to the perfect temperature for drip coffee, around 208 degree Fahrenheit. She proceeded to slowly pour that piping hot water into the filter, and I continued to stand there, mesmerized and expectant, as the liquid fell in a steady stream into my paper cup. When the exacting process was finally finished,  I grabbed a lid, sealed off my cup, and fled the shop with my small taste of Burundi firmly in hand.

I took a few sips of the coffee and detected a light, almost pinot noir-like flavor. But the liquid was still too hot for my tongue to appreciate the coffee’s full pleasures. So I continued to walk to the car, waiting for the liquid to reach its perfect drinking temperature.

That’s when I spotted the Hill Rag box, not far from the temporary home of the Eastern Market. I bent down to pick up a copy of the free publication, and as I did, my exquisite cup of Burundi caught the edge of the box’s door and dropped to the ground with a devastating thud, spilling its vital fluids all over the sidewalk like some homicide victim. I stood there for a second, dumbfounded by my stupidity. I shouted the first word that came to mind, no matter what child may be within earshot: “Fuck!”

I thought about going back to Peregrine and spinning a sad tale about dropping my coffee, hoping they’d take pity on me and offer up a free cup. But I didn’t think that was right; the shop shouldn’t pay for my clumsiness. Besides, I was parked in a 15-minute zone. I had a bad feeling that my $2 copy of the Hill Rag might turn into a $32 one, with the addition of District of Columbia parking ticket.

Let’s say you cooked in three to five different kitchens every week, and you did that for a period of several years? Well you’d probably be pretty good at designing a kitchen.

Personal chef Monica Thomas has that background, plus several years catering experience, not to mention a big family that expects some plate-filling from time to time. She bought her house in Hyattsville in 2001. Kitchen renovation came steadily. First, there were the counters and appliances, plus the corner sink (not pictured).

“I didn’t want to commit to the island until I’d lived with the kitchen for a while,” she says.

But after a few years, Thomas said “I do” to a special, custom-made stainless steel number. One night, she, her husband, and some guests broke out a duct tape role and started laying out the palatial island’s boundaries on the floor.

Here’s the rest of what Chef Thomas came up with:

To allow for more walk-through space between the counter and the island, the back of the island dips in.

Foot pedals for the sink allow you to watch your hands and not muck up the sink faucet handles with your germy, chicken-fat-covered hands.

And that would be the caffeine drawer—for coffee and coffee accoutrement.

There wasn’t a drop of coffee to be found at the Shanghai House of Tea when I stopped at the Glover Park establishment at 11 a.m. today. I knew there wouldn’t be, and even if there were, I didn’t think I had the stones to ask for it. It’d be sort of like asking for a T-bone at Java Green.

Instead, I asked the waitress what she usually drinks in the morning. She recommended a pot of Dragon Well. It’s a green tea, which promotes good health, she said. (Apparently the stuff helps keep your arteries open, which sounds like a good idea given all the red meat I eat.)

My tea was steeped in a transparent plastic pot stuffed with a generous amount of the prized Chinese leaves. The waitress poured the liquid into this lightweight, hollowed-out disc, filling it right to the brim. The golden tea, in a way, seemed to complete the clear cup, as if the fluid were an essential-but-previously-missing part of the tiny container. To suck the liquid from the disc struck me almost as a crime against art and nature.

But slurp it I did. The tea’s body was light. Its flavors were herbal and grassy. It tasted a little like asparagus, but not in an unpleasant way. I happily sucked down a few cups of the Dragon Well while devouring my appetizer and entree (more on those later).

No matter how many cups I drank, though, it seemed like I had barely made a dent in my pot of Dragon Well, and the clock kept ticking on my early lunch/late breakfast. With each passing minute, I felt the need to split. Indeed, I was feeling that unique sort of American prole work-ethic panic start to wash over me, and I realized that drinking an entire pot of green tea was not going to work—at least not at Shanghai House of Tea. I didn’t have the time to linger and enjoy its calming, nourishing, artery-opening effects. I had to blog.

Which meant that I was going to waste a lot of valuable green tea. That pot set me back $8.

And you thought Starbucks was expensive.

Guess where I stopped after I left Shanghai House of Tea?

After last week, in which Y&H spent more time with his computer than his bed, his wife, and his dog combined, and after a full weekend of cooking, eating, and cooking some more, Y&H is ready to ease into his week with some of his favorite blogs.

• Alinea at Home overcomes her fear of the Brine-land to create these little Grant Achatz flavor poppers.

• Amuse Bouche would rather sip an Emerald than chug green beer on St. Paddy’s Day. She’s even turned to an unlikely source for alternatives to malted beverages, a men’s magazine.
• NotionsCapitol has spotted a new trend in the local, seasonal movement: Chefs incorporating Girl Scout cookies into their recipes. Y&H is trying to imagine the negotiations between the chefs and the GS suppliers: “Listen, I don’t care if you are 13 and need three more patches, I expect a goddamn discount on the price when I purchase 100 boxes of Thin Mints.”
• Metrocurean has the scoop on Mick Mier, co-owner of 1905, opening a coffee shop on 14th Street NW called Mid-City Cafe.
• Counter Intelligence has launched a weekly feature, Pair Up, in which she asks bartenders, sommeliers, mixologists, and others to suggest food-and-drink pairings. Personally, Y&H is still impressed with John Wabeck’s indulgent suggestion on what to pair with the tricky poached lobster and braised short-rib ravioli at Inox: a red and a white, in this case a Bordeaux blend and a white Burgundy.  That’s my kind of thinking.

Photo courtesy of Alinea at Home.

Much has been written about Starbucks‘ fall from grace. The coffee behemoth’s profits have plummeted and its stock has lost nearly half its value in the past year (never mind how much it’s lost since the beginning of this decade, because who the hell holds stock that long anymore?). Stores have been closed, and baristas have been given their walking papers. The moralists among us say it’s a fitting fate for a company that epitomized the greed and the overinflated sense of self of the ’90s.

But the marketing gurus are trying to contain the damage with a new campaign to convince you that any Starbucks coffee product priced under $4 is a bargain. The Wall Street Journal published a piece yesterday about Starbucks’ new promotional blitz:

Last year, Starbucks launched a loyalty card that offers free flavoring and other perks for regular customers. Last summer, Starbucks discounted 16 oz. cold drinks to $2 in the afternoon for customers who brought in a receipt showing they made a purchase at Starbucks that morning.

Research also uncovered what executives describe as a disconnect between the company’s actual prices and consumers’ perception of those prices, said Michelle Gass, executive vice president of marketing and category at Starbucks.

“There have been others that have been propagating the myth of the $4 latte, and that is not true,” she said, adding that the average price of a Starbucks latte is $3.25. “We have got to correct the misperceptions that are out there.”

Oh, well, whew, if a medium latte (I never say “grande,” I’m sorry. I just can’t.) is only $3.25, I guess I can have two a day. Let me figure out my annual latte budget. Two per day, not including tax, comes to $6.50. My weekly budget then comes to $32.50, assuming I make my own coffee on the weekends. So that makes my annual latte budget about $1,690. What a bargain!

I mean, what can you do with $1,690 these days?

Image by Flickr user Leonid Mamchenkov

One of the better things that’s happened to our area is the quiet spread of Counter Culture coffee. Yeah, sure, Counter Culture is another one of those companies with all its PC boxes checked—direct trade? check! organic? check! shade grown? check!—but it also produces some terrific java, which you can sip at Tryst and all three Busboys & Poets locations. Today, I found another spot that serves Counter Culture: the DeJaBel Cafe in Wheaton, located right next to the freshly reopened El Pollo Rico.

Named after owner Eddie Velasquez’s three daughters—Daniela, Jasmine, and Isabel—DeJaBel is barely a month old. It’s a welcoming neighborhood spot with lived-in chairs and tables, local artwork on the wall, and friendly staff, but it’s also a work in progress. The place is still trying to find a good source for bagels, for instance. But you can trust the coffee. Trust me.

I ordered a 12-ounce cup of Counter Culture’s “21st de Septiembre” from Zaragoza, Mexico. The drink had more complexity than any cup I’ve had in recent memory: It delivered a nice jolt of acidity on first sip, which quickly turned to some spicy flavors on the palate and then resolved into a bittersweet, almost chocolate-baking bar flavor on the finish. It’s the kind of coffee that makes you remember why you like coffee so much.