Great machine!!

Author's Rating:

Pros: Great tasting and HOT espresso every time, great frothing, easy to use

Cons: water tank window is hard to read

The Bottom Line: 
I highly recommend this machine - great coffee, ease of use and aesthetic value to boot!

Author's Review
The Cafe Roma makes great espresso, steams and frothes milk very effectively, and is great looking to boot. It heats up quickly and its warming tray is effective in warming up cups as long as you leave it on for at least five minutes before you pull the espressos.

The machine is design is simple and effective: the control knob turns one way for coffee and the other for steam. Even the coffee scooper/tamper is well designed (and one piece too, a nice touch), making it easy to fill the grind holder with a minimum of mess. The only flawed element is the water tank, which is hard to read while residing in the machine.

Helpful hints: When you first turn on the steam, place a cup underneath (I use my shot glass) to catch the 1/4 oz or so of water that precedes the steam. Also, if you're steaming before you make coffee make sure to run a little bit of water through the brew head to get rid of the built up steam before you make your espresso. No matter what, you should always run a little water through the brew head before you make your espresso.

The only negative is that the machine seems to make too much 'crema', which makes it hard to tell how big your shots are, although it doesn't seem to impact taste in any way.

I owned a Gran Gaggia for 8 years before buying this machine, and while I was very happy with the Gaggia, the Breville blows it away in terms of quality of coffee taste, temperature, ease of use and magnitude of clean up. In fact, this machine is so good in so many ways that it is hard to imagine spending more money on any other espresso machine (including Breville's) unless of course you want something fully automated.

One last helpful hint. Although this machine is very forgiving in terms of grind (much more forgiving than my old Gaggia), it seems to do better with coffee that's on the coarse side. I've used a Peet's coffee at a grind level of 5, and a D'Aquino (Trader Joe's) that looks to be about the same grind, and it works very well.

One final note: The Cafe Roma no longer employs a removable frother, which to my mind is probably a good thing, since there's one less piece to fail and it steams and frothes very effectively anyway.