Flat White, 17 Berwick Street, Soho

Check out the rosetta - the fern-like pattern- on this flat white! I'd been meaning to go the Flat White in Soho for ages, and it didn't disappoint.

Coffee pot - my new favourite toy

A friend recently went on holiday to Lisbon and very sweetly brought me back this amazing coffee-making device. It is a moka pot but instead of collecting the coffee in the top half of the pot in this little baby it flows up through the central stem and is neatly decanted straight into two coffee cups.

Besides looking very cute, I've discovered its much harder to spoil coffee in it. If you leave a moka pot on the heat for too long it eventually boils, and boiled coffee is nothing more than a nasty bitter brown liquid that will ruin your breakfast and leave you in a bad mood all morning.

When I lived in France I would often put the coffee on the hob then rush down to the bakery for some bread. Normally I would arrive home just in time to hear it bubble through into the top container but if there was a queue at the baker's I would return to the smell of burnt coffee and sometimes splashes of coffee over the wall behind the hob.

However, with this new version the coffee is protected from the heat by both the china of the cup and the little metal shelf it stands on which is not directly above the boiling water. Genius.

Algerian Coffee Stores Ltd

I have only recently discovered Soho as a place for food-related adventures. In the past few years I'd been there once or twice for so-so Chinese food and went to an insalubrious bar, cruelly lured in by the offer of a free shot which turned out to be Ribena.

I started cutting through Soho as a way of avoiding the hell that is the herds of aimless, ambling crowds on Oxford Street, but now go there to gaze in the windows of the Italian delis and sushi bars - window shopping for food.

On Friday, while I was gazing in shop windows at kinky accessories, reading menus posted on walls and adding to my mental lists of restaurants I want to visit I came across a little red shop that smelt strongly of roasting coffee beans. The Algerian Coffee Stores is a Aladdin's cave of all things hot-drink related: huge glass jars filled of dried flowers and herbs for tisanes, tiny Moka pots, wooden drawers with coffee beans roasted to different degrees and the prettiest tins of sweets you've ever seen. Most appealing of all was a large board listing all the different types of coffee and blends on offer.

I couldn't decide between the Lebanese blend (with cardamom) or the Arabic (with cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves and cardamom). The man behind the counter recommended the Arabic so I went for that one and he set about measuring out a mixture of dark and medium roast beans, grinding them and then adding the ground spices. Then to compound my love for the shop, after I had paid I was offered a dried fig dipped in chocolate to taste: I was completely seduced.

Despite the blend of dark and medium roast beans the coffee is much darker than what I'd been drinking before. The spices work really well, mingling with the aroma of the coffee to create a small and taste that is not quite like coffee or sweet spices something new, and more intriging. It's a coffee that I think is better suited to after-drinking than breakfast, and I can't wait to try it out alongside baklava. Even though six hours have passed since I made the coffee my kitchen still carries a faint scent of a Middle Eastern souk.

Algerian Coffee Stores Ltd, 52 Old Compton Street, London W1D 4BP

Weekend breakfast

Saturday morning: coffee, toast and apricot jam, newspapers and the soothing tones of Sandi Toksvig on Radio 4. Bliss.