Goal for 2025: Drink More Mochas

long live novelty coffee!

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My cookbook AMRIKAN: 125 Recipes from the Indian American Diaspora, is available wherever you like to buy books. Would very much appreciate it if you left a review, too. You can buy the book here. The book has been on several end of year best lists (19 at my last count??), which is incredibly flattering including The Washington Post, the LA Times, Saveur, and NY Mag.

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Hello! Happy New Years Eve! I hope you are doing something that brings you joy tonight.

I am having a couple of friends over for a very chill dinner that is half homemade/half store bought, which feels like the right type of note to end this year on. I have all kinds of bubbles chilling in my Rocco fridge (highly recommend investing in one if you are someone who enjoys several types of beverages) and will be serving a cookie plate of store bought treats and hopefully some layered champagne jellies if they set right in the fridge.

There’s a million-and-one 2024 recap posts but something that I loved most from this year is that novelty coffee is fully back and we are past that terrible era of third wave coffee snobbery and the chokehold of black drip coffee deprived of dairy and flavor; creativity and fun! A result of that? Mochas are back on most coffee shop menus and I could not be happier.

best iced mocha i’ve ever had (from stagger in koreatown)

This was the year that I understood just how good a mocha could be. It’s generally a mix of steamed milk, a shot or two of espresso, cocoa powder or some sort of chocolate syrup, combined and served hot, or cold, over a cup of ice. In many ways, a mocha is essentially adult chocolate milk. It does double duty: hitting notes of nostalgia while also offering a good and viable source of caffeine.

Personally, I am a huge fan of the iced dark chocolate mocha from Go Get Em Tiger which features really good steamed milk with chocolate ganache made from Tcho chocolate, I think they hit it with a little sea salt too for balance.

the crowd at Stagger

But I just had the best mocha i’ve ever tasted this morning as I was running errands. I popped into Stagger, a newly opened coffee shop in Koreatown in Los Angeles. The line is long for their viral matcha with a matcha cream top, but I went straight for the iced mocha, which is made with two espresso shots, ganache, and a housemade orange syrup which makes the drink taste like a melted Terry’s Chocolate Orange, my favorite holiday candy of all time. Blew my mind, was worth the 10 minute wait for the drink, and I will absolutely be back and I will absolutely try to recreate it at home. I hope we start to see more canned mocha products in grocery stores, too.

Also a housekeeping note from me: I will be back in the new year with a revamped newsletter, with an expanded presence, and a more frequent cadence now that I am not on book tour! So keep your eyes peeled. Thank you for reading!

What you most excited about for 2025? Do you have a novelty coffee you loved? When is the last time you had a mocha? Let me know in the comments!