Dan Pitt’s Opinionated Compendium of Downtown Palo Alto Restaurants
Dan Pitt’s Opinionated Compendium of Downtown Palo Alto Restaurants
I avoid caffeine and am therefore not a coffee afficionado so I have been put off by the complication of ordering coffee at Caffè del Doge (most people leave off the Venezia). You can choose beans, roast, grind, and blend, and they use color codes for degree of caffeination. I am exuberantly ignorant of all this – plus I’m color blind – so ordering makes me feel like so much trailer trash. So after doing my best to decipher the menu (it is a secret language, after all) and speaking in my truest Italian (which I have studied) I finally got my order across to the barrista, an American, who turned to the real Italian guy making the coffee and translated my order into “small decaf latte.” Next time I’ll just do that myself. It was delicious, by the way, and my companion reinforced my belief that among the roughly twelve thousand places to get coffee in downtown Palo Alto this place has the best.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Even the ignorant can enjoy Caffè del Doge Venezia