i thought it might be fun to take a 225 mile trip out of town and see what toscano tastes like, so i hopped on the amtrak to DC to see my friends awesome color play some rock shows in the south last week.

it was a short and sweet trip, just long enough to get my eardrums blown out and drink a lot of coffee. it turns out that george bush isn’t the only crazy person in washington, DC — i encountered numerous, ah, colorful characters in the nation’s capital. (not the least of which included the staff of murky coffee.)

my first coffee stop was murky capitol hill, where i ordered a vaguely expensive and startlingly large “small” cappuccino (what do you guys serve a “large” in — a 5-qt rubbermaid?) the barista warned me the milk might be a touch thin and she’d be happy to re-make my drink if i didn’t like it. it was fine — but having someone offer you a quality-control redo even before outing yourself as a total nerd is a nice touch sometimes. murky’s college-town-cafe vibe didn’t make much of an impression on me, but i’d be back in the morning.

from murky i headed over to big bear cafe in the bloomingdale neighborhood. big bear is warm and rough and cozy and seemed worth the wander over — but by the time i got there i was hungry and disappointed to see they had the same unimpressive (to me anyway, and admittedly at 6pm) selection of pastries that murky had. in a town the size of DC, it’d be nice if the *two* different places to get good coffee didn’t use the exact same espresso blend and pastry vendor. in fact it would seem intuitive to not. but maybe that’s just me. i had a fine macchiato and caught up with my friend david before going off to get my hearing damaged.

in the morning i returned to murky coffee. i ordered a macchiato, better than last night’s capp but not as tasty as the one at big bear, and did work for an hour, still no impression of this place either way. until i ordered a second drink. and then a guy who cleans up garbage for the capitol district came in wearing a long blue cape with a star on it. and a woman named alice who makes marker drawings of trees and diamonds and napkins and sells them for $5 approached me unintelligibly and tried to sell me her artwork — luckily i’m from chicago and this woman was significantly less intimidating than wesley willis. soon i was introduced to murkies deva, zack and anne boatner, and before i knew it anne was setting up “coffeemakers” — the coffee version of the boilermaker, famous-ized by katie carguilo at the mid-atlantic regional barista championships — which involves dropping a shot of espresso into a half-full glass of milk and chugging the thing. and in this case, chugging it at noon on a basically empty stomach. jesus christ!

ten minutes later owner nick cho comes in to repair some stuff, looks around the bar and says: “where are all the shot glasses?!” umm…

yeah, okay, even though i can drink toscano at every cafe in NYC, i’ll admit it — murky has magic. i’ll be back to order an “emergency postcard” and a coffeemaker from these nutjobs real soon. i think i love them. the prices are high though — must be because they sell to all those diplomats. i hear diplomats love chugging glasses of milk on an empty stomach. see you at coffeefest, murkies.