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Coffee dinners are not a new concept. We\u2019ve covered<\/a> quite<\/a> a<\/a> few<\/a> of them on Sprudge over the years and they all have a similar underlying mode: a coffee company teams up with a chef or restaurant to bring the two worlds together. Sometimes this means pairing coffee with food, sometimes it means using coffee as a component of a dish, sometimes both. But generally, it is a person from the coffee world working with someone from the culinary world to find the middle ground.<\/p>\n But a new dining experience is happening in Austin where the coffee person and the culinary person are one and the same. Created by former Fleet Coffee<\/a> barista and ninth-place finisher at the 2018 US Barista Championship Brandon Acu\u00f1a, Rover Concept<\/a> is a \u201cprogressive American ultra-fine dining experience\u201d and they are now taking reservations. Oh, and it\u2019s a pop-up.<\/p>\n Inspired by James Beard Award-winning chef Grant Achatz of Alinea<\/a> in Chicago, Acu\u00f1a tells Sprudge he wants to use Rover as \u201ca way to show a new type of thinking,\u201d one that \u201clooks at every detail equally,\u201d from the food to the spoons used during service to the light to the temperature of the room. The idea for Rover began to codify for Acu\u00f1a while working at Fleet preparing his routine for the US Barista Championship. Working with Lorenzo Perkins and Patrick Pierce, Acu\u00f1a wanted to do something different than the regular routine, to find the gray areas in the rules and do things that weren\u2019t necessarily allowed but weren\u2019t specifically disallowed. It was this same sort of thinking he wanted to apply to the culinary world. After placing ninth, Acu\u00f1a was given the opportunity to work the front-of-house at Alinea for a few months before returning to Austin to begin his ambitious new project.<\/p>\n As a dining experience without a permanent address, Rover is Acu\u00f1a\u2019s answer to the question \u201chow can I take a Michelin-level concept to the consumer without an address?\u201d Being held at a currently undisclosed location on Austin\u2019s east side\u2014an event space \u201ca lot of people visit frequently\u201d that Acu\u00f1a doesn\u2019t want to name because he \u201c[doesn\u2019t] want people to have a preconceived idea of what to expect\u201d\u2014a total of 10 dinners will take place between May 23rd<\/sup> and June 9th<\/sup>.<\/p>\n “Stone Fruit”<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Each dinner will feature a 10 to 14 course tasting menu, each with coffee playing a factor. For some courses, it\u2019s about rethinking how coffee is served (Gesha snow, anyone?). In others, it could be playing off a word or phrase common in the coffee world, like the \u201cStone Fruit\u201d course. Using the idea that a stone fruit is a drupe as is the coffee cherry, this course involves a white flesh peach poached in sous vide burnt heavy cream, served on top of a cultured version of that same heavy cream, with an Ethiopia YirgZ espresso thickened with a cold soluble form of gelatin and molded into the shape of a peach pit.<\/p>\n Tickets for Rover Concept’s “Coffee” experience are available via their website<\/a> for $150 and include wine and cocktail pairings. If all goes well with this first installment, Acu\u00f1a says he would like to take Rover on the road and is currently eyeing 10 cities in the Midwest and on the coasts. Currently, the first two dates have already sold out over a month in advance, so signs are looking good that this new coffee concept may be coming to a city near you. For more information, visit Rover Concept’s official website<\/a>.<\/p>\n Zac Cadwalader<\/a>\u00a0is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas.\u00a0Read more Zac Cadwalader\u00a0on Sprudge<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n All photos by\u00a0Nicholas Friesen for Rover Concept.<\/em><\/p>\n The post Austin: Rover Concept Mingles Coffee With Progressive Fine Dining<\/a> appeared first on Sprudge<\/a>.<\/p>\n Source: Coffee News<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Coffee dinners are not a new concept. We\u2019ve covered quite a few of them on Sprudge over the years and they all have a similar underlying mode: a coffee company…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[26],"tags":[63,27,65,33,61,32,59,31,30],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1939"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1939\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1939"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1939"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecurbkaimuki.com\/rest\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1939"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sprudge.com\/file\/2019\/03\/brandon-3575.jpg\")
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