"seattles best coffee" news and stories

Burger King's new breakfast menu made its debut in restaurants across the country on Tuesday in the company's "largest menu expansion ever."

New breakfast items include pancake platters, blueberry mini-muffins, a cibatta breakfast sandwich and iced coffee drinks, Nation's Restaurant News reported. The new menu items will be available until 10:30 a.m. daily.

"We're ready to compete to be America's wake-up call with our new BK Breakfast Menu," Mike Kappitt, Burger King's chief marketing officer for North America, said in a statement. "We're recognized far and wide for our superior burgers, and we're confident guests will know and love us for breakfast as well. Given the quality, variety and value on our new menu, Burger King is sure to become the destination for breakfast."

It wasn't a rash of espresso-guzzling Italian immigrants or even an enterprising chancer like Starbucks founder Howard Schultz who turned Seattle into America's coffee HQ: it was the weather. The damp, London-esque climate here has been an overpowering influence on its food scene, according to Seattleite Ethan Lowry, co-founder of urbanspoon.com. "Our notoriously grey weather, coupled with those long, dark winters - we're one of the most northern cities in the continental US - means we need things that are pick-me-ups. Coffee was a natural fit."

Food writer and cookbook author Cynthia Nims agrees. "Sitting down over some great coffee was one of those things you could do easily on a misty winter day," she laughs. Lowry goes further, suggesting that Seattle's warm, unfussy vibe is also meteorological. "In so many cities, there's the option to sit outside. But here, there's a dearth of outdoor cafes and a cozy feel to a lot of Seattle's restaurants," he says. The city is as ingredient obsessed as San Francisco, yet without its showoffish snobbery - chanterelle mushrooms or Dungeness crab, both staples here, were foraged casually rather than farmed and marketed to foodies. Nims sees the influx of Scandinavians as underscoring that understatement, in all aspects of local life.

Read on about Seattle's coffee, salmon and more, after the jump...

Seattle's Best Coffee turns 40 this year, and is marking the occasion with something of a renaissance -- or midlife crisis. The brand, which has been owned by Starbucks for the past seven years, has long been number two (ironic, given its name) to the ubiquitous green label. Now the company is taking a totally different approach, pitting Seattle's Best against other players, namely the fast-food giants that got into the premium coffee game fairly recently, such as McDonald's and Dunkin' Donuts.

In order to effect this change, the newly positioned Seattle's Best has a stripped-down logo intended to "match [their] optimistic outlook and simplified approach" -- although some question whether the extreme simplicity moves into the realm of the generic. Tom Ehlers, a former Starbucks executive who is now vice president of retail for Seattle's Best, told The Wall Street Journal that Seattle's Best will be the Old Navy to Starbuck's Gap. Citing the jump in overall premium coffee sales (from 29 percent to 35 percent in three years, despite the recession), Ehlers points out that mass-market coffee is a sales gambit that has worked: "Regular people have found their way to great coffee."