Coffee Drinks - Tapa dura

From the fifteenth-century coffee houses of Constantinople to the twenty-first-century coffee bars across the United States and Europe, coffee's golden age stretches for more than six hundred years. Americans brew 235 million cups of java every day, making it the most popular social drink in the country. What drives our obsession for this beloved brew--the rich aroma of the roast, the peppy caffeinated zing, or coffee's astonishing versatility? Few other beverages can be served piping hot, icy cold, light and frothy, dense and sweet, or wickedly spiked. And nowhere is coffee more imaginatively explored or more elegantly presented than in this custom-crafted compilation. Recipe contributors include notable coffee purveyors and a highly competitive cadre of award-winning baristas. Each one of the fifty recipes is sure to keep your senses alert and percolating.

Michael Turback was trained as a restaurateur at the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration. For nearly three decades he operated the award-winning restaurant Turback's of Ithaca, and he is a founding partner of the online department store The New York First Company. Turback has written about his hometown's invention of the ice cream sundae, commemorated the centennial of the banana split, and celebrated the culinary and enological joys of New York's Finger Lakes region. Following the success of Hot Chocolate and Mocha, Coffee Drinks is his third beverage book. Michael Turback lives and works in the enlightened city of Ithaca, New York.

THE AUTHOR SCOOP

Who would you cast as yourself in a movie of your life?
When I ran my restaurant in Ithaca, NY, we would often guess who would play each of the staff if they ever filmed the story of running a restaurant. The consensus was that Clint Eastwood would have been tapped to play me: "Go ahead, make my day."

Have you ever met a famous person?
Guest speakers and performers who visited Cornell would often be taken out to dinner at my restaurant, so over the years I met people like George McGovern, Geraldine Ferraro, William F. Buckley, John Houseman, Douglas Edwards, Carl Sagan, John F. Kennedy Jr., Betty Freidan, Andre Tschelicheff, Al Unser, Jr., Kim Alexis, Cousin Bruce Morrow, Peter Yarrow, and Neil Sedaka, to name a few.

Favorite cocktail?
Smoked-Tomato Bloody Mary (Stonecat Café, Hector, NY)

Favorite dessert?
Tin Roof Sundae (Tom's Ice Cream Bowl, Zanesville, OH)

Tell me something that people might not know about you.
As a long distance runner, I've completed 109 races of marathon distance or longer (includes five 50-mile trail races).