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Squaring the circle at Omotesando Koffee, Fitzrovia

Omotesando Koffee, Fitzrovia
The name “Omotesando” is represented solely by a square on a sign outside the shop. Is this a practical realisation of squaring the circle?

There was a lot of excitement late last year (2018) as the London branch of Omotesando Koffee opened just off Oxford Street. I watched as there were visits by Brian’s Coffee Spot, and Bex’s Double Skinny Macchiato and others, thinking that soon, I too would pop along. After all, it is a place that celebrates pour overs in central London. And yet, I went for the first time two weeks ago while meeting Sadiq of Amoret Coffee to discuss details of the first coffee and science evening being hosted in the Notting Hill branch of Amoret on the 11 June (more details and sign up page here).

On that first occasion, I had enjoyed a Rwandan by pourover and took in the minimalism and cubist geometry of the cafe but largely was too involved in discussing details of the event to think about the connections that the space prompted. And so a second visit was arranged. Again I found that the fold out chairs underneath the bench tables were a little too tall for me (though on the second occasion I didn’t fall off) but it did mean that, although I had a prime seat in front of the bar where they were preparing my pour over (a Burundi from guest roaster La Cabra), it was not easy to turn around to watch. It was however great to find that the cake menu at the order point at the front of the cafe clearly listed all the allergens in each of the cakes and so I was able to confidently enjoy a vegan banana cake with the coffee.

Omotesando Koffee, brownie with square revealed
Cubes and squares were a recurring theme inside the cafe

Omotesando offers a challenging space for a website built on the premise that any cafe offers an opportunity to explore connections to the wider world of physics if you just slow down, take in your surroundings and notice them. It is a space that seems to revel in minimalism. Most of the space is a fairly light coloured, mostly uniform wood. The bar is framed with a cube, a shape that seems to crop up all around Omotesando, even in some of the cakes. The fold out stools (circular) are made of the same colour of wood as the rest of the majority of the cafe (though there are a couple of exceptions to this which hint at the carpentry). Perhaps the idea is that we should focus on the coffee rather than the environment. And maybe that is where your mind enjoys wandering, but another thought suggested itself to my mind.

Sitting on the stool facing the window, wishing that I could turn around to watch the pour over being poured while remaining comfortable (there is a foot rest when facing forward), it struck me that sitting right in front of the bar did not help me when I wanted to use the glass of the window as a mirror to the inside of the cafe. The glass was perfectly transparent to my eye and reflected very little of the light behind me. The fact that the side of the (La Marzocco) espresso machine was transparent rather than metallic and revealed the pipework and wiring that enabled great espressos to be prepared (we also enjoyed an iced latte) briefly led me to consider why some materials are transparent and others not (and also how transparency varies as the frequency of light changes).

Banana bread and coffee with IoP bag
My pour over coffee, a banana bread and my IoP re-useable bag sitting on the table at Omotesando, Fitzrovia, London

But as I reflected further, I could see in my mind’s eye, the viewpoint of a deep sea diver looking up from the sea bed towards the sky. A circle of light, “Snell’s Window” opening above them. You can see images of Snell’s window where divers are framed by the effect in the photograph here. The effect is caused by the refraction of the light as it enters the water. Just as a straw (paper of course) appears bent as you view it through the glass of water, so light entering the sea will be bent by an amount given by Snell’s law. Even light entering at a grazing incidence will be refracted towards the ‘normal’ (the line perpendicular to the sea-air interface) and so if you work through the maths (there’s a good description here), you find that you will only see light from a cone of about 100 degrees around your view point.

Coffee reflections
What would you reflect on?

But although Otomesando has an entirely glass frontage, you do not feel you are in a gold fish bowl, nor can you only see a small window outside. The wide window instead offering plenty of opportunity for watching the office workers and builders scurry about outside. And, on writing this and looking through my photos of the cafe, I noticed that my photographs of the front of the cafe and of a coffee inside were both taken at shallow angles showing the reflections from the surface of the window and the coffee rather than the interior. An effect almost opposite to that of the deep sea diver. Omotesando Koffee offers a space where each cup offers further opportunities for reflection: more time for noticing the physics of the everyday. A great place therefore to spend some time thinking about, as well as enjoying, your coffee.

Omotesando is at 8 Newman Street, W1T 1PB

Categories
Coffee review Observations Science history Sustainability/environmental Tea

A post in need of a Curator(s) Coffee, Fitzrovia

espresso Curators
A deliciously intense and fruity espresso from the ‘specials’ menu at Curators Coffee.

Curators Coffee in Margaret St in Fitzrovia has been there for years. A great location just off of Oxford St, with plenty of seating and good coffee, and so it is perfect to pop into, unless you are like me and avoid the Oxford St area as much as possible. Which perhaps explains the rarity of my visits. I first popped into Curators Coffee a couple of years back (before the laws on allergen information came in) when I remember enjoying a lovely long black but couldn’t have a cake because the people behind the counter that day couldn’t tell me which (if any) cakes contained nuts. At the time, I sat upstairs and noticed the graphene type arrangement of hexagons around the back of the space and the Bramah’s 300 years of coffee makers book in a rack at the back. I had wanted to return to properly cafe-physics review the place at a later date (and try the cake) but circumstances (and Oxford St avoidance) meant that I never got round to it. Until very recently.

This time, I noticed that there were three single origin coffees available to try as espresso. Glancing at the tasting notes it was a fairly quick decision: “chocolate”. And although this time I had just had lunch and so passed on the cake, it appears that the espresso choices regularly rotate, offering an incentive to come back again and try something new. Although the café is quite large, with plenty of seating, it seems that it is also very popular. And so there were no spaces remaining upstairs. Fortunately, there were more seats downstairs and so, taking our table number with us, we made our way down the stairs and found a table at the window, as if it was waiting for us.

UFO in Curators Coffee Fitzrovia
A UFO reflected in the window? Why? What? Why (again)? It is small details such as this that reward you as you put down your smart phone and notice your surroundings.

Perhaps it is obvious that a café called Curators should have art work adorning the walls. That, and the spotlights that highlighted the work immediately caught our interest, (although it was odd to see that one of the rows of spotlights was almost devoid of bulbs). The exhibition downstairs seemed to have a tilt towards street art and a couple of decorated aerosol cans were on the windowsill priced at £15 each. Was this the time to consider why an aerosol gets cooler as you spray the walls with it?

Outside the window, a staircase leading up to the street outside had railings in straight lines leading up towards a blue sky. Inside, a space craft was reflected in the window.

Indeed, on checking again, there was a spacecraft, like a cartoon of a stereotypical little UFO, drawn onto the wall behind my accomplice’s head and reflected in the window next to it. What could it mean? Regardless of whether some UFO incidents are associated with visitors from other planets, there are a large number of scientific thought trains we can take when considering a UFO reflected in a window. To start with, how likely is it that we are alone in the universe or that there are many other intelligent life forms in other planetary systems?

The question has been answered on the basis of probability for many years. But recently, we have been finding more planets orbiting stars and crucially, more planets that are in the ‘habitable’ zone around other stars. Assuming that life elsewhere needs similar conditions to the earth’s in order to thrive, the idea of life elsewhere is becoming increasingly real.

canali Curators Coffee
If you see straight lines such as this, it is fairly sensible to infer that they were built by an intelligent life-form. Can you see canals on Mars?

Closer to home, there were even suggestions that Mars may support flowing water, thought to be a host for bacteria based life. And although these interpretations of the flow patterns observed on the Martian surface have more recently been contested (could they instead be flowing sand?), we continue to send probes (such as the Insight probe that landed recently) to the red planet to investigate its geology. Did Mars once host life?  Mars of course has a resonance in science fiction for being the planet hosting extra-terrestrial life. HG Wells imagined the Martians landing just south of London, and eventually being killed off by exposure to bacteria on earth that they had not experienced in their Martian habitat. Could life on Mars suggest a (tenuous) further link to this café on Margaret St?

Perhaps one reason that people started to imagine (intelligent) life on Mars came about because of an interesting mistranslation of an astronomical observation. While gazing at Mars in 1877, Schiaparelli noted ‘canali’ on the Martian surface. The correct translation of this in this context into English is “channels” but what the observation came to be known as was “canals”. Canals imply an intelligent builder, and hence life on Mars. Later observers also saw these ‘canals’ and a popular myth was born. It is a useful lesson for us all, sometimes how we see something can be influenced by the language we use to describe it.

soya hot chocolate, Curators
We photograph our coffee, and share it with our online friends. But would putting down our phone in a cafe be worth something for the planet as well as for ourselves? How many batteries do we need?

And then one final thought train, prompted by photographing the cafe with my mobile phone. The whole probability argument rests on two assumptions. The first is that there are other planetary systems (which we are finding). The second is that life is fairly easy to start, or at least, that the chances of producing life are not restricted to one planet a short distance away from the Sun; we are not unique. As yet we don’t know whether this assumption is justified but discoveries such as the deep sea hydrothermal vents challenge our preconceptions about the requirements for life and suggest that life could start more than once, and so could very well start on other planets, not just ours. In these vents, bacteria are known to convert what we think of as toxic chemicals into energy in a process known as chemosynthesis without the need of sunlight or other ingredients that we had thought essential to life. Could similar hydrothermal vents on other planets host new life forms?

And in a related way, what is going on with these vents? Is new life being created even now in the deep sea? In which case, what do we think about deep sea mining? If our aim is to reduce our carbon dioxide emissions by using more re-usable objects and renewable energy sources, we will require more batteries and batteries require (among other things) cobalt. If we are all to keep using mobile phones to photograph cafés, we too need the batteries which rely on these elements. A number of companies have realised that there is a vast untapped resource under the sea if only we could dredge it up. This may be easier or ultimately cheaper than recycling the old batteries. It may destroy a few hydrothermal vents or stir up the sea bed but what concern is that to us if we can gain access to more cobalt to allow us to have more batteries to allow us to all be ‘greener’.

Indeed, of what concern is that to us?

Curators Coffee is at 51 Margaret St, W1W 8SG