Back in the UK having an espresso after a restaurant meal is starting to catch on, but it's still a cosmopolitan novelty really. It wasn't until I arrived here that I really appreciated how great it was to end the meal with a few drops of strong coffee.

I bought one of the Italian aluminium Mako coffee pots the other day (as a present for someone really, but it turned out that someone else had beaten me to it!). The Mako pot is the hexagonal pot that you put directly on your stove top, and the water at the bottom pushes it's way up through the coffee into the top. It's a rather scary device, since the whole thing relies on the pressure of the steam, and on my first attempt I hadn't tightened it properly and it hissed like mad. The pressure release point is also a bit worrying, since it confirms the whole thing is really a bomb just waiting to happen. If the thing gets blocked up, then bang! Red hot pieces of metal and scalding coffee shredding your kitchen. Still, probably worth it for the coffee.

So far though, I've only managed insanely strong coffee sludge. It's getting closer, and there is a hint that this is going to be fantastic coffee when I get it right, but at the moment the practice is making me a bit, well, frazzled :-)
Being a geek I did read up on how to use it on the web, and the most interesting thing I found was about it's facist origins, where the Italian government of the day was trying to make everyone use aluminium.

The other element of the after dinner coffee is of course the little biscuit or chocolate you get with it. I've never been sure whether you have it before or after the coffee, but I suspect it doesn't really matter. I did wonder what would be the waiter's reaction if you put the chocolate into the coffee, but I've never tried this out (I had enough hassle at a help yourself restaurant, where the waiters were highly amused at my efforts to take cheese, then coffee, then apple tart, and then back to cheese! What food snobs!).

The best coffee side dish I've found though, is a little glass of chocolate goo, which was given to us at L'Imprevu just down the road from chez moi. Gorgeous!