Neighbor Coffee and Friends is the new coffee truck in the 5000 Burnet Food Court.
The 5000 Burnet Food Court is one of best food courts in the city.
Trucks are carefully curated for quality.
Neighbor Coffee fully deserves to be there.
The coffee is good but what you are really there for are the biscuits.
* * *
Neighbor Coffee and Friends is not your standard Austin coffee truck.
Coffee in this town is espresso - or more specifically espresso coffee drinks.
People take the Starbucks formula and improve on it.
Starbucks is a pretty easy standard to beat.
You can find a lot of very good latte-and-snacks-in-a-cool-room establishments.
Neighbor will do espresso if you insist.
They will even dump milk and Italian syrup in your coffee if you insist.
(They know the value of restraint. They remind you on the menu that cortado is an option.)
* * *
But what Neighbor is really all about is drip coffee.
Drip Coffee is our neglected coffee ancestor.
We visit Drip Coffee at the retirement home every few months.
We only stay for fifteen minutes.
Even high quality espresso houses tend to commit elder abuse against drip coffee.
They just make a pot of coffee and let it sit and go bad.
You order a regular coffee, you get stale indifferent Joe.
* * *
Here the focus is on magnificently executed drip coffee.
For those of you who like fancy brewing technology, they do pourovers, French Press and Chemex.
The fancy brewing pots work, I guess.
However, to my ignorant mind, the big thing in coffee is having good beans, roasting them well and having the coffee freshly made.
Repeat: the coffee should be freshly made.
As long as you make the coffee fresh, your Mom's coffee pot should be just fine.
However, in the spirit of advanced technology and whizbang pots, I ordered a cup of their pourover.
Neighbor makes a dark strong bitter drip coffee.
The coffee comes on rough.
Drunk black, it is unpleasant at first sip.
But I came to like it a lot.
The coffee is strong enough that the taste will start accumulating in your mouth.
As the taste accumulates in your mouth, it starts giving you a nice bitter coffee afterglow.
The coffee afterglow lasts long after you finish your cup.
Coffee afterglow is a good thing.
It is like lying contentedly in bed afterwards.
* * *
But to hell with the coffee.
What really matters is the biscuits.
They do a plain ordinary buttermilk biscuit, accompanied by mini-tubs of butter and preserves.
You can ignore the tubs.
That biscuits all by themselves are sensational.
My number one starchy treat for breakfast used to be the French Toast Bagel at Nervous Charlies.
Neighbor's biscuits just blew French Toast Bagels out of the water.
And they did it without resorting to sugar.
Neighbor's biscuits are very savory.
They are also very buttery without you adding any butter from the tub.
Very savory and very buttery means something to love.
They also do a lemon-lavender cake.
I am not a lemon-lavender kind of a guy,
But with baking this good,
They just might make me lemon-lavender-curious.
* * *
If you are looking for a German chocolate cake peanut butter latte, you can go to Monkey's Nest.
At Monkey's Nest, a German chocolate cake peanut butter latte would actually be pretty good.
If you want to eat Japanese food while drinking brown sugar Vietnamese coffee, you can go to Sa-Ten.
I kill for brown sugar Vietnamese coffee.
If you want to spend all morning in a very cool room, pretending to be an experimental film maker or a graduate student in sustainable architecture, you can go to about a dozen places on the New East Side.
Sa-Ten will work for that plan too.
But if you want uncompromising drip coffee and really good biscuits, you need to go to Neighbor and Friends.
You can do your studying and internet surfing at home. read more