[coldtea]

There's a HUGE culture behind Turkish(/Greek) coffee, and tons of details on making it.

A better machine could mimic the technical part (not that anybody makes them like that currently), but the very idea of a machine making it is against the whole philosophy of drinking it.

It's like making love to a plastic doll.

[mjn]

I agree as far as the ritual of making it in homes goes, but in a restaurant using a machine doesn't bug me much. Even when the coffee is made in a briki/cezve, at a larger store it'll be in a big assembly-line process in the kitchen, which doesn't really capture much mystique for me, and isn't visible to me anyway: all I see is that some coffee comes out a bit after I order it. So in that case it's just as well, to me, if a machine does it, as long as the quality is the same.

[coldtea]

>I agree as far as the ritual of making it in homes goes, but in a restaurant using a machine doesn't bug me much.

For a larger store sure, it doesn't make much difference.

But the traditional way was at small coffee shops (kafenes) where people would see for hours, smoke shisha etc. Usually with a sand based stove (hovoli) etc.