Last week I received the oddest request. A customer wanted to purchase sushi with his coffee. Completely puzzled, I rephrased his question and asked it back to him. Basically, "You want sushi with your coffee?" (Huh?) He responded that yes, indeed, he'd like to be able to purchase sushi and coffee in the same place. In a polite way, I offered my opinion that I just didn't think coffee and sushi went together. Since that day I have wondered, would they? I've never seen raw fish listed as a complimentary food to any variety of coffee. That was, until I discovered the pairing of coffee and caviar.

Don't be fooled (like I was). Coffee and caviar are not independently being paired together. Rather, the coffee is an imposter merely imitating the look -luckily not the taste- of caviar. At the Northwest Barista Championship, Espresso Caviar made its regional debut. Barista Billy Wilson concocted this creation with a chemical reaction. His drink involved pulling 4 shots of espresso, mixing them with a solution containing sodium alginate, then pulling it all into a piping tool and dropping it into a water bath containing calcium chloride.

A chemical reaction then formed a thin layer around each ball of espresso, causing them to resemble caviar. Wilson repeated the process, creating a total of about 400 caviars (100 for each of the 4 judges). He served the caviars over milk foam and topped them with a mixture of creme fraiche and chocolate, then sprayed grapefruit over the drink.

Wilson will use Espresso Caviar as his signature drink when he competes in May's U.S. Barista Championship. "It's something that nobody's ever seen before," he says. "It's kind of out of the box. There are several people trying to work on this for a signature drink. Nobody could figure out how to make it quite right. I just happened to luck out and come up with a way to do it." It sounds fishy to me, but with coffee caviar as a front-runner for the USBC, maybe espresso sushi isn't far behind.