Douwe Osinga's Blog: Albanian Espresso

Monday, June 13, 2005

The espresso in Albania is of surprisingly high quality. It is one of the good things about being an ex-Italian colony. You see things like that a lot when you travel. English colonies tend to have great railways, see India, Egypt or Southern Africa. The French colonies usually have at least local bakeries that do nice baguettes. Germany didn't have a lot of colonies, but the ones they have and where I've been to, Namibia and parts of China (Tsingtoa) at least have excellent beer. And the Dutch, well, we had Indonesia for a good four hundred years, with great culinary consequences too: the best Indonesian food available in Europe is to be found in the Netherlands.

1 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's got nothing to do with the Italian colony issue. We've been drinking exclusively Turkish Coffee up until 1992. The majority of Albanian Immigrants in the early 90's went to Italy. They brought back Italian Culture, and thus, when the first restaurants and bars opened, they began serving pizza, spaghetti, espresso etc. Everyone loved it...and today the standards for pizza, spaghetti's, and espresso's are equal to Italy, or at least pretty darn impressive for 18 years experience.