Cold Brew & Coffee Cocktails or: How to Break the Hegemony While Caffeinated
October 29, 2020
It was a chilly weekend morning. The fog hung thick and surrounded our apartment like a winter cocoon — or at least that is how I remember it. A few days before I got a message from Gloria del Fogón suggesting that I order a brunch she was making together with Nommi, a coffee pop-up that was on my radar but that I knew nearly nothing about. The subtext was that I would be foolish to miss it. There were two options of food originating from the Andes mountains of Venezuela. I simply told Fogón to send whatever she thought was best.
The spread was mostly a selection of recipes from Fogón’s mother’s cookbook: wheat arepas and a potato and cilantro soup called pisca andina. There were also sweet rolls painted with mulberry jam called quesadillas and papitas de leche, a candy globe made of condensed milk that were dressed with edible flowers and dill leaves. We were meant to feast on everything with a tall glass of cold brew with so much ice that it peaked over the rim of the glass and a sprig of spearmint and squirt of lime.
I was inside my apartment, where I had been almost without fail since March, but for a moment it felt like my dining room table was floating through space. The cold brew was the intuitive reminder to stop and pause. The mint aroma, sting of lime and ice that brushed against my upper lip arrested me briefly with each sip, a visceral cue to my brain to imagine myself in Fogón’s kitchen where I was being invited to sit at the table while the smell of cilantro and potato grew and perfumed the room, just as she did as a child sitting in her mother’s kitchen.
When I finally sat down with Yoled Hernández and Panze Castaño, the duo behind Nommi, the reaction made sense. “We want the coffee to empower the food,” Hernández explained. “The goal is never for us to be the protagonists, but to do everything we can to build an experience where coffee is used to embolden but never overpower.”
The duo have been working since early 2019 popping up all over the city of Buenos Aires and are peculiar in the dining scene from whichever angle you look at them. Nommi uses coffee as a vehicle to break down “the hegemonic structures that the restaurant embraces”. They make tea infusions with normally discarded coffee cherries, only use plant-based milks, work exclusively with women baristas which they invite to be the protagonists of their platform. We sat down over a tasting of different coffee concoctions and discussed the importance of worker based projects, what it means to build community and levelling the restaurant worlds power structures.
How did you two meet one another?
Panze: I was working as an assistant cook at a vegetarian restaurant and I always went to a café nearby and she was working at that café. I was in the middle of studying to become a barista. Later on she moved to Cuervo and I followed. We just started talking and became friends and gradually started hanging out outside the café. I don’t remember how it came up but one day we started talking about what it would be like to make coffee at a bar or restaurant to get out of the café scene. The cafés have a structure that is like, this is the menu and that’s that. There are some places that let you do a bit more than others but there is always a ceiling. The basis for Nommi was that, take coffee to a different context.
Yoled: The project developed slowly and we still haven't fully defined this. It’s in constant flux. We want to have the space and freedom to experiment and play around. Like Panze said, it was really important to us to get out of the specialty coffee circle and bring coffee to people that maybe don’t know what that is. We want to bring it to people that aren’t really in the restaurant or specialty café world.
What are you referring to by limitations?
P: A lot of things. In Buenos Aires, the basis of coffee is Italian. Most places work with an espresso machine. The espresso let’s you play around to a certain point. You could make an espresso martini and some other stuff but there is a limit. There are places where they let you experiment behind the bar but it’s difficult to bring that to the menu which is limited by machinery, the team’s structure, the clientele, the neighborhood.
Y: Not everyone has a space to do different kind of filtered coffee. There are a lot recipes that have become standardized too. When cold brew started appearing they were all very similar. Really strong and full bodied. I think that the ability to experiment is becoming more common but you are always going to have to think about your menu. And that isn’t just with the drink itself, you see it in the food that is offered in coffee shops too. There is always a cinnamon roll, a carrot cake and a medialuna. And as a barista there isn’t a lot of room to shake things up. We are always looking to work in places that aren’t coffee shops. We want that challenge of having to break people’s expectations. The first pop-up was at Georgies. And we had to ask ourselves, what happens when you serve a coffee that is accompanying a fried fish taco? What are the possibilities? How will people react? What can we do to help people understand that you can eat anything with a good cup of coffee?
What’s on the other side of that coin? What does freedom look like?
P: We never repeat our recipes. We go to each place and we get to know the flavors that are most present in the kitchen. We consider what spices they use, the flavors that the cooks are most attracted to, the smells, what the kitchen aspires to accomplish. We take all that information and choose the grain, we analyze the best methods, we consider different cocktails. The idea is to create a fusion. We want the food to empower the coffee and vice versa. We have our recipes of course. We have our standard cold brew with its coffee bean and our process but when we take that to an event, we make changes. That is something that being itinerant allows us. We don’t feel married to a bean or a roaster, we can choose our own path every time.
Nommi is really particular within the dining scene but even within the pop-up scene where there is always a protagonist. You two are baristas but you bring other baristas to work the events while you two stay behind the scenes. Tell me about that.
Y: We are Nommi but when we do pop-ups it’s not always our face. We want to give a platform to other baristas, we listen to them, we want to hear their ideas, we want to push them out of their comfort zones which is behind a coffee counter. If they want to do something totally unconventional, we will do everything we can to make that happen. That makes this whole thing much more dynamic. We want to work with and for everybody because that is how community is built. We want everyone to come, we want this to feel like a big team, that we play together and include everyone.
P: We want to visibilize people. We know a lot of baristas and know many that are really talented but they get stuck behind this label or the brand of wherever they happen to work with and that really limits you. It also promotes this idea that we are anonymous and anyone can do this. We know that isn’t how this works. There are people that have built an incredible knowledge around their craft. The idea is to get people to understand that value. At the end of the day, it is the baristas hands making that coffee and we want to highlight that knowledge. There is also this idea of the male barista all tatted up, good looking, hegemonic, and sure there are plenty doing incredible things, but there are a lot of very talented people who don’t fit into that box and we want to give them the space to interact in a different way.
Y: We have only worked with women. And many of them weren’t professional baristas either, just people with an incredible passion for coffee and we invited them to be a part of it. There are infinite ways to prepare coffee and a lot of that has to do with the individual barista. We are all different so of course we all have different techniques and recipes we’ve developed. My espresso isn’t the same as Panze’s espresso, and that doesn’t mean that one is better or worse, it simply means they are different. We all imprint something onto the things we make and in or transmit that to people, it makes no sense that it is always us behind the bar.
Now I understand why people don’t immediately understand the project. You are running against the entire structure of gastronomy which is built on hierarchies. A few people make decisions and they become the protagonists too and the media reinforces that by only focusing on the bosses and exaggerating that by focusing on specific looking bosses in specific kitchens in specific neighborhoods. It’s an industry based on the participation of many but the visibility of few and Nommi is tearing that notion apart.
Y: We never were interested in being the face of this. Sometimes we have to work the bar because we don’t have the budget to pay. We choose places sometimes that maybe don’t have a big following but we want to work with them anyway. We did an event at a place called Clandestino, which was literally clandestine, and we created this amazing set-up. The tables, the drinks, the whole thing was so incredible. One table showed up. Obviously we want to fill a place up, but that was a great experience that would’ve been different with more people.
P: The conditions that we and the people we work with are really important too. We know that this project is work for whoever participates. There is a beginning, middle and end and that has a monetary value. There is this idea of like, it’s just coffee how hard could it possibly be? Or if you are a cook, you are totally replaceable. Have you ever stood on your feet for 8 hours in 40 degree heat in front of an oven so hot it waxes your legs? We don’t pay as much as we’d like to, but we are incredibly transparent about that and do everything in our power to make sure that everyone is comfortable and taken care of. We treat people how we wish we were treated. It’s really nice that someone comes to you and says, hey what would you like to do? Normally you go to a gig and they say, ok this is what you need to do and you do it. When someone says, what would you like? That’s totally different.
Y: The result is different because you are having fun. They have fun because they are contributing what they want to contribute. We want to protect people and we want to work in spaces that feel that same urgency. Restaurants are fucked up. We’ve been wrong about a few places and have learned. We aren’t interested in this idea that this person is better than that person. We know that the best work is done with a team.
I tried the cold brew you prepared for a recent brunch with Trashumantes. The cold brew came with lime and spearmint which was a combination that surprised me and that combined with the food in a way that surprised me too. I don’t know if I am more sensitive lately but that brunch hit me different than most food. I felt like I was eating something that was very intimate for the people making it.
P: We had been following their work for a while but since they are a pop-up too we didn’t know how to do something together. In July, I ordered a meal for my partner’s birthday and we started talking and hit it off. When I tried their food I thought to myself, I need to be these people’s friends. I couldn’t believe how delicious it was. We met up and got along really well and decided to do a brunch. The first one we did (there were four), was very chaotic. It was a new space and we were a little delayed with everything but everything came out really well.
Y: It was a collaboration that was very different from others. Although we did a lot of planning because of COVID and our living situations we didn’t want to risk a bunch of meet ups. They told us the menu and we prepared something kind of blind. When we finished that first event, we sat down to eat and I was shocked by what we were able to create together. It was really beautiful. I felt like I was cooking with family. We imprinted a story onto that meal that was incredibly personal. The last day we were all crying. I emigrated from Venezuela five years ago and I have a lot of mental blocks built up because half of my family is still there. There is something really incredible about food in that it wakes up sensations or memories that you weren’t expecting. At the beginning when we were working together, I felt really blocked. I was keeping everything at arm’s length without realizing it. When I tried that food I nearly broke into tears. They cooked something that made me feel like I was back at home sitting with my grandmother, the music in the background with my aunts and uncles and cousins laughing and joking. That was what was in the air and each brunch became more intimate, more personal. It was a moment for me of being able to let go of certain things and begin to reconnect with my home, my family and so many other things that through that food began to have a positive connection again.
P: The feedback was really great too. A lot of Venezuelans ordered but lots of people who don’t know anything about Venezuelan or Andean food told us that they could feel the emotion of that experience. That was important for us to understand that these kinds of connections were possible. That it is possible to build this web of people. This was so personal, it was like here is my home in this little box of food. Here. And it also reinforced so many other things that we had been learning in other events, that it is possible to create something incredibly personal and delicious when there is mutual respect from top to bottom. We don’t have to treat each other like shit to create a good product. We can value one another.
Y: It was really important for us to see how they worked together. They work from another space. There were obviously things that went wrong because it is a kitchen but they never responded with anger. The first reaction was to find a solution. We needed to know that that existed. We want to get out of this culture of putting everyone down which is so common. Every person is important. This is one big machine and there isn’t a single screw that is more valuable than the other. I don’t know, you could be a great cook who treats the dishwasher like shit, and because of that the dishwasher doesn’t care about what he is doing, and you plate everything on dirty dishes and you’ve ruined everything. That’s the point. Understanding that we are all valuable. The whole chain matters. When you work like that, everything is better.