Nespresso Pixie Launch Party with Ted Allen and Pixie Lott

My first exposure to Nespresso was from my former roommate who owned a machine. We would chat over an easily made espresso (pop in capsule, press button, and voila). And they were good! They may not be as good as the ones made by real baristas at, say, Intelligentsia, but they were certainly better than what I could achieve, and at $0.55 per capsule they make espressos a more affordable life style choice.

So, Nespresso recently launched a new model. A much more compact machine dubbed Pixie, which easily fits on small kitchen counters (my Pixie is smaller than my water kettle or my bread box). More about the machine later, let's talk about a party. To get word going about the Pixie, Nespresso held intimate parties around the US and I was invited to the LA one, held in a suite at the W Hotel in Hollywood. There were various reasons to come to this party, one of them was that Ted Allen from Food Network's Chopped was there to host the party.

A propos to the name Pixie, they had a British hit pop singer Pixie Lott perform a few songs for us also! Now, I hadn't heard of her before since I'm pretty unaware of the pop world, much less the British pop world, but apparently she's huge there and was actually named "Hottest Female" by Virgin Media Music Awards.

While we were there, we of course tried some espresso made by The Pixie.

The Ristretto was actually the most intense (10 out of 10). It was still smooth, though if I remember correctly from trying them before, I liked Livanto the best.

The Pixie came in various colors which they had nicely placed across the room with the appropriate color scheme. Do you notice the green one sitting behind the green flowers and wasabi?

Since what is a party without alcohol, we had a couple of cocktails made with the ristretto espresso as well. It easily works for a rich chocolate-y "martini" though the espresso mojito was a tad strange.

The foodbloggers there got to chat quite a bit with Ted Allen, who turns out to be very friendly and approachable. We talked about how he hadn't gotten a chance to eat out much since he's been working on a new cookbook. We tried to get him to go to Jitlada (since he said he liked Thai food). I don't think he made it there, though. Too bad!

I will talk more about the Nespresso Pixie itself in another post. In the meantime, since I did enjoy Pixie Lott's performance there, I will leave you with a clip of her singing her song "Cry Me Out" (her big hit was "Mama Do" but I didn't think of recording it when she sang that first!)