1. It’s “Currywurst“
2. It’s “Currie” Barracks
3. I moved to Calgary in August, 2000, not November, 2002
4. Brian was kind of hurt by my “Toronto didn’t love me” comment, so let me clarify: I adored Toronto and always will, but my life there was not the urban delight I envisioned before emigrating, mostly because sessional work forced me to be in my car, some semesters, 10 and more hours a week. All of that commuting and my status as transient in general made me feel, pretty much, on the outside looking in. Would they do this profile of me in The Star? Maybe, but I doubt it.
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| Chris Koentges |
| Calgary Herald |
Friday, December 07, 2007
For a number of years, John Manzo was a ghost to me. Something between a flâneur and the graffiti artist Banksys. He left a trail of secret curry houses and sushi joints back when Chowhound.com’s “Canada board” was just a bunch of threads about Montreal, Toronto and Vancouver. That was the winter of 2003, and there suddenly seemed to be more of these secret little joints than Calgary had ever had. You’d pop into some new Vietnamese sub place Manzo discovered and end up eyeing the other customers between heavenly bites. Which one was he?
I remember a packed Film Fest party in Eau Claire. I don’t remember the movie we saw, though I can vividly picture a guy at our table afterwards. He talked about currwurst in Germany. He mentioned Uptown Sushi–more than once. And then he disappeared.
“Who was that?” I asked our mutual friend.
“John,” she said.
I swallowed hard.
“Manzo?”
Another woman we hadn’t been talking to suddenly turned around. “That was John Manzo?”
My friend paused. Confused. “Umm… yeah. That was John Manzo.”
He was just under six feet, and had the build of someone who conducted his exploration by foot–yet whose goal was some unfathomable unending feast. He had a beard and glasses. I began haunting his favourite places with more regularity, hoping to catch him in the act. Uptown. The Coup. Tiffin’s. What would I tell him, exactly? You’re not alone? I’m onto you, pal? Umm…thank you?
There were other Calgary hounds with names like Yen and Gobstopper, who were collectively more poignant. On the one hand, it was that Manzo treated it like an adventure. And there was something curious about his determined defense of Calgary cuisine–Calgary culture. He had obviously lived in other cities. He was clearly very educated. Yet his encounters with the city seemed almost delusional. Blissful. He had an ability to turn this seemingly bland place into anything he wanted. This ability lies at the heart of chowhounding–of being an urbanist in a place like this–it’s knowing there is as much adventure in a strip mall as The Museums of Modern Art. You need know only how to unlock it.
Manzo came to Calgary in November 2002, when he joined the U of C’s sociology department. Before that he was in Toronto. And before that, he taught at The University of South Alabama in Mobile. There was a place called Carpe Diem across the street that roasted its own beans and served real espresso. That was the introduction. He arrived in Toronto during the 1996 Starbucks invasion. Back then, Starbucks and Second Cup were a revelation. They made all these espresso-based drinks with semi-trained baristas on reasonable quality machines. The era came to be known as coffee’s “second wave.” (Baristas describe the first as “more a caffeine and heat delivery mechanism than anything with an enjoyable flavour.”)
Before Manzo moved to Calgary, he investigated the eating and coffee. He found Beano, Higher Ground and Joshua Tree. Intriguing independents. He found Calgary was full of surprises.
During the 2001 Remembrance Day Reading Week, Manzo travelled to Vancouver. He stayed across the street from a place called Caffè Artigiano. “I’ll never forget the date,” he told me. “Everything came to a crash.”
Artigiano had begun to create what’s known as third-wave coffee. “Third wave” is a bloated way of saying: let us now consume coffee as if it were fine wine. More profoundly than wine, in fact, because now coffee will be a perfect collaboration through the chain. There will be virtuoso growers from all over the world. Importers building “direct trade” relationships, above and beyond fair trade. There will be someone who can masterfully blend all the different terroirs. Someone who can roast it. A café with machines capable of unleashing the blend. And ultimately, a barista who could unlock the potential in all of it.
Manzo would go back to Artigiano for cappuccino. It wasn’t made with foam, but silk. And the silk was poured in the pattern of a perfect rosetta. At that moment, the renowned Calgary Chowhound1 added Coffeegeek2 to his repertoire of identities.
I met Manzo at 9:30 on a Friday morning. We’d initially planned a field trip to Phil & Sebastian, which is a weekly pilgrimage for Manzo, but he sent me an e-mail that read: “There’s no way to talk to a coffeegeek without seeing his home setup.” I could describe it for you, but better you just watch the video on his blog3.
As we talked that morning, he referred to the trinity: Bumpy’s, which has replaced Big Mountain on 11th Street; Java Jamboree with its Synesso Syncra machine (supposedly just the second in Canada); and P&S, with its twee subtext and $11,000 Clover machine out at Curry Barracks–and its long, never-ending line of customers.
So many customers that P&S is supposed to open a second location downtown. So is Jamboree. Artigiano is rumoured to have three in the works. Over the summer, Janice Beaton took over Beano, which is suddenly on the cusp. And Good Earth Café draws nearer each week. Calgary stands to have more than a dozen bona fide third-wave inner-city coffee shops by this time next year. By comparison, Manzo told me, New York currently has two. Of course, if we had a nickel for every opening that never happened. But holy crap.
I don’t suggest that Manzo is the reason for any of this. I can’t honestly say what he represents. Perhaps he’s just an unrelenting voice in a subculture that has been short on such local voices. Because, more than he is a chowhound or coffee geek or university professor, he is–for me–a Calgarian. In most big cities, he’d be quite ordinary. But here he stands out. “I loved Toronto,” he told me. “Toronto didn’t love me.” A gay man who likes coffee, gelato and cheap sushi–who’d have thought Calgary would end up loving him back?
And as much as I dislike the expression–and it will surely offend his academic sensibilities–I’m going to go out on a limb and call Manzo a third-wave citizen. Someone who has been to enough places to know what makes a city a city. They know what a city ought to be constructed of.
They know how to discover its character. Such citizens once seemed rare and precious here. But in the last month of 2007, Calgary feels not just like a city brimming with Manzos who know how to unlock the true potential of here, but a place that, in return, can unlock the true potential of our Manzos.
Notes: 1. chowhound.com/boards/57 2. coffeegeek.com/forums/worldregional/canadawest 3. jfmanzo.wordpress.com/2007/11/23/espresso-esperimentation-with-my-leva
