The Daily Beast has crunched some numbers and determined which U.S. cities have the most caffeine running through their veins. As you might have predicted, the Pacific Northwest is the jumpiest among us. Seattle comes in first with 35 coffee shops per 100,000 residents, followed by Portland with 28. The District slips in at No. [...]

Mark Furstenberg, the master baker who apparently can't rise in the morning without a strong shot of espresso, wrote me shortly after I posted this video about the future of kitchen gadgets. He wanted to take me to task for mocking the portable espresso machine. Wrote Furstenberg: I have one and took it with me [...]

Note: We're publishing the entire Young & Hungry column on the blog so you can enjoy Darrow Montgomery's photography, which has its own story to tell. In the land of the over-stimulated mermaid, the landscape is always the same: the tiny tables crowded with laptap squatters, lost in their ear buds and their private worlds, [...]

While waiting on my hand pour of Valle del Santuario at Mid City Caffe yesterday, I was pouring over the coffee shop's suggestion page. Among the garden-variety ideas like selling the Post and offering more tea varieties, there was this little nugget: "Please take over Starbucks. Thanks."

Falafel shots and hot dog air coming soon to a mobile vendor near you! For Y&H, there's usually a pattern to my April Fool's Day, and it goes like this:  I login to the computer, call up Google to conduct a search, and sit there slack-jawed for a minute while reading about the Google Gulp [...]

Cupcakes from the Bakeshop Everyone, it seems, is going bonkers about cupcakes. Sometimes I like to kid myself that I hate cupcakes, just because they're so freaking popular, but I don't. I'm not crazy about some of the cupcake culture — mostly, the exclusive, Georgetown boutique ambiance of some cupcakeries — but by and large [...]

Call me naive, but I had moderately high hopes for 15th Avenue Coffee & Tea, the new stealth-Starbucks coffee shop that eschews Frappucinos for wine and beer and attempts to buck the chain's corporate image. I've always loved the European-style cafe, with good espresso and alcohol, as a quiet counterpoint to bars; done right, they [...]

I'll admit it: Starbucks is often my default morning cup, and I'll tell you why. It's convenient. You can't throw a Hear Music compilation CD without bonking some barista over-extracting your espresso. I mean, before the recession hit, I think they were planning to open a Starbucks in my dog's crate. Not that I totally [...]

Wednesday, as dedicated newspaper readers know (all six of you who don't rely on blogs for news), is the day that papers around the country publish their Food sections. Today's edition of Food Blog Roundup plucks both blog and print items for your gastronomic amusement. Bitten knows that every seed is sacred.

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 [...]