Commentary: Wake up and smell the coffee snobbery
LONDON: I was hugely excited to hear that a cafe in London is now serving a £15 (US$xix.90) cup of coffee; though non as excited as I would have been had I been 1 of the many London journalists asked to sample it.
Perhaps this is a new business model for cafes: Create something and so preposterously expensive that journalists have to come to test information technology out. That'due south got to keep the cash rolling in.
Then, in about a calendar month or two, when all the earth's hacks have tired of tasting the £15 brew, the cafe tin can come upwardly with a new one for £25 and kickoff the process all once again.
Seriously, this is the future — media services. "Need a story — come up on downwards to our restaurant, we are selling pork scratchings at £50 a pocketbook."
WHY Do We PAY So MUCH FOR Java?
Clearly the real pay dirt is if you can get a Tv crew interested; that's about three people each needing to gulp down a £15 coffee from the plains of Yemen. Then, evidently, you will want to buy a few more than cups to test on passers-past for the prestige slot on the nightly news.
Of form, the screamingly expensive coffee is but the one that garners all the publicity and pulls in the self-selecting aficionados. Regular punters can get a shot of house joe for the bargain price of £3.fifty.
Anyway, the bottom line is that I was not deemed refined plenty to get taste the Yemeni gold blend. So they sent someone more cultured. Naturally I practised for the role.
I stood most the FT'south Food & Beverage desk slurping McDonald'south Americano and saying things like, "Yes, I'm getting definite notes of java, with just a hint of coffee aftertaste". Obviously this wasn't enough for the assignment. If you want to go sent to sample the £15 cuppa, you accept to know how to discover notes of bergamot in a cup of Caffe HAG.
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Anyhow, the bespeak seems to be that the coffee is from Yemen, the saccharide from the Indian Ocean, the milk from Normandy, the beans twice roasted and ground between Mila Kunis's shoulder blades and the water filtered through George Clooney's chest pilus.
COFFEE SNOBBERY
Plain, the whole thing is simply the latest summit of coffee snobbery, but information technology is hard to object. If y'all are rich and stupid enough to pay that much for a brew at the Coff-up Buffet and then it is just correct that an proficient arrives to relieve you of your cash.
It is your absolute right to pay through the nose and sit sniffing over your cup with the intensity of a cold sufferer over a Vicks Vaporub steam inhaler.
I'chiliad sure it's darn fine java just the partition in society is not really between those who exercise or do not possess a sufficiently refined palate to appreciate a £15 coffee. It is between those with a sufficiently refined brain to know not to bother and those not and so lucky.
What I do object to is when the java snobbery spills out into normal life. If someone wants to get out of their mode to buy a £fifteen coffee at a java bazaar, then skillful luck to them.
They are probably happy to cover all the affectations and other superciliousness about not adding milk and dunking Hobnobs or whatever.
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The problem is that this is beginning to infect ordinary places. I take now lost count of the number of simply slightly upmarket restaurants refusing to offering sweetener or skimmed milk with java because the barista feels his view is more than important than the customer's.
PAYING FOR THE ELITISM
There is a place near the office that serves roast chicken — a sort of posh Nando'south replete with exposed brickwork and wooden benches that for some fourth dimension refused to provide sweetener.
The identify sells roast chicken — roast chicken! However it'southward even so as well hip to have a few sachets of sweetener. The £15 coffee is at to the lowest degree offered by a French Michelin-starred chef. The bar staff at the chicken store are just making coffee; they aren't Heston Blumenthal.
If people desire to flock to a luxury coffee boutique, then the owners can be as dictatorial and sniffy as they like about the product. You lot are paying for the elitism. Dorsum in the existent globe, you can shut upwardly and pass the Canderel.
Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/commentary-wake-and-smell-coffee-snobbery-293446
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