Why are the espresso machines always broken? (Park City: home, organic)

[kletter1mann]

I speak of specifically of restaurants. In Starbucks and coffee shops they seem to work fine. But try to get an espresso in a restaurant. My partner and I have been studying this question, and we eat out a LOT. The odds of getting an espresso, even in an Italian restaurant, are about 10%. Maybe less. "Oh, we're sorry, the espresso machine is broken." Again and again and again and again, the same thing. "The espresso machine is broken." This consistently happens in Park City too, though not quite as often.

Do the espresso machines break the moment we walk in the door? I don't think so. So why do they lie about it? What's the real reason? Is it so hard to just say, "Sorry, we don't have espresso, [just not enough demand or supply your own excuse]." This is particularly galling, as we just returned from a 3 week road trip in California and were reminded of how it's supposed to work. Their espresso machines all seem to work fine, and are everywhere except fast food places.

OK sure, you can say, "Quit whining, that's California, we're in Utah. You know that here coffee is second only to alcohol as a public menace." Fair enough, yet there's a whole mini-industry here promoting and boasting about the "burgeoning food scene," the up-and-coming new chefs, the farm-to-table stuff, how SLC isn't just funeral potatoes anymore, all the hip coffee shops all over the place, yada yada. In fairness a few servers have told me that they don't do espresso cause then they'd have to do cappachino, latte etc - basically duplicate a coffee shop. But what a bunch of crap. That's like a diner saying they don't serve orange juice cause then they'd also have to serve mango juice and guava juice (though in California diners often manage to serve have all that stuff too).

So what's up with the broken espresso machines? Doesn't anybody else like espresso after a meal and not just in a coffee shop? It's not like I'm not asking for a bottle of Sambuca to just appear on the table to go with the espresso, as it does in some places. Just an espresso!

Rant over.

[kavm]

Have you considered the possibility that the toxic dust from the GSL is really hard on the espresso machines?

We are still minimizing restaurant visits since Covid - not cutting them out completely but reducing it to very low frequency. The food scene obviously is not in the same galaxy as California.

[kletter1mann]

Originally Posted by kavm

Have you considered the possibility that the toxic dust from the GSL is really hard on the espresso machines?

We are still minimizing restaurant visits since Covid - not cutting them out completely but reducing it to very low frequency. The food scene obviously is not in the same galaxy as California.

Yes, that did occur to me. Yet Starbucks and the independents seem to have managed to effectively shield their machines to such effects, rendering them immune. And surprisingly my home machine remains uneffected and I have no shielding mechanisms at all. So it's a great mystery.


And yes again, clearly not in the same food galaxy as CA, or even in the same dimension. But I don't think I'm asking for much. Even a 50% success rate in reasonably upscale restaurants would be fine. And they don't even hit that in PC much less over here.

[moguldreamer]

Most likely, the machines are not broken even though they say that. Most likely, it is a shortage of staff - and think of the labor involved in making a fru-fru half calf/half decaf latte with 1/3 soy milk and 2/3 oak milk topped with unpasteurized cow's milk foam, sweetened with organic bee honey harvested on a full moon, etc etc etc. All that time making a drink is time the short-staffed restaurant isn't attending to the basics of service. No one wants to work these days.

BTW, friends don't let friends drink Charbucks.