Isa’s Coffee Around The World

Tucked away in a picturesque fishing village on the Ligurian coast, is a newly opened 4 star design hotel which is really worth the visit.  It is also one of the few luxury hotels on the Ligurian coast which offers specialty coffee from the Lavazza 1895 brand 🙂. And I have to say that the breakfast cappuccino prepared by the hotel barista was sublime… in fact, I could have sat looking out at the sea drinking coffee after coffee all day. What can I say, a clear 10/10. Why can’t all high quality hotels have the breakfast coffee prepared by...

After 25 years, I am back staying at one of the top 5 hotels worldwide, La Mamounia.  And it is as beautiful and magical as I remembered it all those years ago!   On walking through the hotel on the first day, we spotted an expensive Victoria Arduino Italian coffee machine in one of the restaurants  – something we were not expecting in a place like Marrakech. So we had high expectations for the coffee at breakfast. But, the cappuccinos we ordered were a huge disappointment: watery and insipid. How could the coffee brewed in such an amazing coffee machine end...

This week I am staying in one of the best hotels in Switzerland.  Having seen the CHF 14 price of a cappuccino at the Mandarin, I had two thoughts: first, that this was up to now the most expensive cappuccino I have ever come across (does anyone know a place with a more expensive one?), and second, that this must be one of the best specialty coffees in the world. Imagine my horror when a cup of tasteless, hot milky water with a tablespoon of cocoa on top was served.  I immediately sent back the coffee and asked for a...

After spending several days enjoying locally produced coffee across Vietnam, we ended up at one of Hanoi’s most iconic hotels for a few days.  This was the hotel where the infamous get-together of Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un from North Korea took place on its garden terraces!However, instead of enjoying more local coffee, the hotel was offering…. shock horror…Nespresso capsules from an automatic Nespresso machine!  Hats off to the marketing department of Nestle who have managed to convince high-end hotels in coffee-producing countries to purchase mediocre coffee capsules from Switzerland .How can this be possible?  Such a hotel will pay...