I've just come in from the opening of Belfast's very first Starbucks, and I was impressed. Cheery 'partners', stunning PR rep, an amazing press kit including electric coffee grinder and more, as well as about three pints of strong, strong coffee. I'm bouncing off the walls right now.
As I understand it the Starbucks people are experts in the art of the 'viral sigil', and before long I can expect every local coffee shop to be replaced. Is this a bad thing? Once you get past the fair-trade rightonery is, as I suspect, Starbucks a great, corporate evil That Must Be Destroyed? Or is it just a decent place to get good coffee?
Posted by Astromariner (Member # 446) on :
quote:Originally posted by My Name Is Joe: Or is it just a decent place to get good coffee?
Er, none of the above? Starbucks coffee tastes like a finely judged mixture of burning tyres and the gastric juices of a bilious elephant, topped with the froth skimmed from a bubbling cesspool.
Posted by Vogon Poetess (Member # 164) on :
I've only been in one once, and that was by accident because they changed the cafe in Borders on Oxford Street to one without telling me.
The cup of tea was alright, in a fairly big mug.
I don't drink coffee.
Isn't Starbucks just the most well known of loads of bland coffee chains though? I always meet one group of friends in a Caffe Nero. Are they bad too?
Posted by Astromariner (Member # 446) on :
Also, they can't even get hot chocolate right. Hot chocolate is the easiest thing to make in the world: all you have to do is bung some chocolate powder into hot milk, and then mix it together. A retarded gibbon could do it, so why do the 'baristas' at Starbucks - people who have been on training courses and have gained certificates of excellence in hot beverage making - fuck it up every single freaking time?
Posted by MiscellaneousFiles (Member # 60) on :
Five chains, ranked according to the quality of their black filter coffee (or Americano):
1) Coffee Republic 2) Caffe Nero 3) Costa 4) McDonalds 5) Starbucks
Posted by discodamage (Member # 66) on :
there is a shop in greenwich which used to sell shells. nothing but shells. oh, some little tunes of glue, for making shell art, and some plastic wire and fastenings to make shall necklaces. if you live in london and dont get to go to the beach very often, it is incredible how satisfying it is to go and buy a shell, and put it to your ear whilst walking down the high street and pretend you are by the seaside for a second. obviously it is not as good as going to the beach and finding a shell, but it is good enough.
the shell shop is now a starbucks, obviously.
Posted by Abby (Member # 582) on :
The coffee is like goat piss, but the panninis are some of the best I have encountered. Although they are significantly more expensive than normal.
I have a strange craving to go to a very greasy spoon and have something like ham, egg an' chips. The nearest sign of civilisation to Hammersmith Hospital however is a fecking Starbucks! And that is a good 15 mins away. Fuck knows how all the sick people make it here.
Posted by Louche (Member # 450) on :
Given that I have lost the will to do much except go and buy a pair of flipflops to liberate my soggy feet from the constriction of some ill-advised warm shoes, can everyone just assume that I have posted a lengthy, well-informed and articulate rant about globalisation as represented by chains of exploitative coffee shops?
Thanks.
Posted by saltrock (Member # 622) on :
quote:Originally posted by Louche: Given that I have lost the will to do much except go and buy a pair of flipflops to liberate my soggy feet from the constriction of some ill-advised warm shoes, can everyone just assume that I have posted a lengthy, well-informed and articulate rant about globalisation as represented by chains of exploitative coffee shops?
Thanks.
]
Yep! It makes my eyes hurt less when you just want us to pretend rather than actually read 15 paragraphs of postliciousness.
I don't have any coffee chains at all where I live. But we do have a tea room attached to the Shaul Bakery that do a nice cup of tea, but shit coffee.
[ 12.08.2004, 07:10: Message edited by: saltrock ]
Posted by mooch (Member # 730) on :
Says it all (not too work friendly).
Posted by Astromariner (Member # 446) on :
Wasn't MINJ responsible for a thread a few months ago that said something along the lines of "I've just discovered a bijou little eaterie called Pret A Manger. I wonder if anyone else has heard of it?" Next week: the culinary delights of Little Chef.
Posted by Ringo (Member # 47) on :
Personally I think Starbucks coffee tastes ok. It's overpriced, sure, but then so is everything. You get to go in and sit in a comfy seat and drink coffee. That's good enough for me.
I also think McDonalds burgers are tasty, and no amount of pople telling me the burgers are pounded by 5 year old Korean children out of testicles and brains will change my mind about that.
Posted by Uber Trick (Member # 456) on :
quote:Originally posted by Astromariner: Little Chef.
Its called Road Chef now Posted by My Name Is Joe (Member # 530) on :
quote:Originally posted by Astromariner: Wasn't MINJ responsible for a thread a few months ago that said something along the lines of "I've just discovered a bijou little eaterie called Pret A Manger. I wonder if anyone else has heard of it?" Next week: the culinary delights of Little Chef.
Yes, and Ringo coined the 'next week: Minge discovers...' gag, so you owe him something for breach of copyright!
You need to realise that things taken for granted in 'the capital', or even 'the mainland', take many moons to manifest here. Saying that, there are plans for 3 more Starbucks before Xmas...
Posted by Astromariner (Member # 446) on :
Sorry Ringo. Posted by Louche (Member # 450) on :
I probably couldn't manage a well informed rant about Starbucks as after Not on the Label, Fatland, Why the Wolrd Hates America and Fast Food Nation I got issue fatigue and even looking at my pristine copy of Glabalisation and its Discontents fills me with indescribeable depressed apathy and an urge to open a bottle of organic wine.
Also, the Manchester Evening News loathes Starbucks and I take it as a point of pride to be vociferously in favour of everything it opposes, so my loyalties are kind of divided on this one.
Posted by Uber Trick (Member # 456) on :
I wonder what MINJ looks like? (as with the majority of my contributions this has no relevance what so ever)
Posted by turbo (Member # 593) on :
I love Starbucks. There are no Starbucks near to me. In fact, the last one I went to was in NY which is a bit far to go for a mug of coffee, even nice Starbucks coffee. I have a feeling I might only love Starbucks the way I do because the only cups of Starbucks coffee I've had were drunk at moments when I had been drinking shit coffee for weeks and Starbucks represented a kind of caffeine-heaven for me. But I don't care. I have a couple of Starbucks mugs at home and I will continue to drink from them with pride.
P.S. I like the new apathetic Louche.
[ 12.08.2004, 10:00: Message edited by: turbo ]
Posted by mooch (Member # 730) on :
Aye, Starbucks make OK tasting coffee. But isn't it nice to go into an independantly owned coffee house and experience something a little different. Dont you find the UK is crowded with franchises and just about everywhere you go there is bound to be the same shops on every high street. Starbucks has a decent setup, obviously people like it or they wouldnt be so successful. But in Melbourne or NY there are countless unique coffee shops etc which add so much to the city.
So fine they have comfy seats and caffeine but it would be nice to have a few more unique places scattered around. They tend to have more soul.
Posted by Louche (Member # 450) on :
I've swopped my apathy for flipflops. Now I keep staring at my naked, visible, mangled feet and thinking that I ought to do something girly like get a pedicure but the prospect is actually so terrifying I think I am just going to rely on the fact that I'm a long way away from my feet and therefore don't have to look at them much.
Posted by kovacs (Member # 28) on :
I liked Starbucks when it was just a brand you read about in American novels like The Silence of the Lambs -- having the same mild thrill of otherness as Jack in the Box or Denny's -- rather than an outlet on every corner. Their coffee is certainly on the expensive side; you have to pay £1.70 to get anything drinkable, as the "normal" coffee at £1.30 or so tastes like the burnt dregs of an urn diluted with boiling water. In "holiday" seasons they really start taking the piss with concoctions like Tangerine Christmas Latte, costing some £3.20 for the same size container of warm frothy stuff (with marmelade-type bits floating in it).
I maintain contra Misc that McDonald's coffee is bottom of the pile, also that "Americano" is the most boring style of coffee you can buy. I would go AMT Coffee before anything else, though Costa isn't bad and to my mind, being relatively cheap, works out as a toss-up with Starbucks for 2nd place.
Posted by Abby (Member # 582) on :
I think the problem with non-chain coffee shops in the UK is that often the cakes/biscuits are utterly shit.
They have those enormous sawdust croissants that are more like bread than croissants, various iced/raisin/cinnamon buns that are more like bread than cake, and once I bought a chocolate chip cookie that was so appalling that I couldn’t eat it at all - and I was very hungry!
This also applies to savory things – sandwiches, wraps, samosas etc All are unpleasant, stale and lacking in filling, and give the impression that they have been constructed by a sweaty man in a dirty apron, who was probably smoking a fag and watching countdown at the time.
Posted by MiscellaneousFiles (Member # 60) on :
quote:Originally posted by kovacs: I maintain contra Misc that McDonald's coffee is bottom of the pile...
That's down to personal taste I suppose.
quote:...also that "Americano" is the most boring style of coffee you can buy.
Not if you're allergic to milk. Also the Americano is the purest way to drink coffee, as it is undiluted with milk and other such fripperies. Surely this enables the drinker to appreciate and assess the quality of the coffee itself more effectively than if it were polluted with syrups, creams, froths and powders.
Posted by damo (Member # 722) on :
quote:Originally posted by Louche: I probably couldn't manage a well informed rant about Starbucks as after Not on the Label, Fatland, Why the Wolrd Hates America and Fast Food Nation I got issue fatigue and even looking at my pristine copy of Glabalisation and its Discontents fills me with indescribeable depressed apathy and an urge to open a bottle of organic wine.
i'm off to see outfoxed tonight, with a discussion afterwards with "music row democrats". i'll let you know how that goes shall i?
Posted by Louche (Member # 450) on :
x
[ 12.08.2004, 12:31: Message edited by: Louche ]
Posted by StevieX (Member # 91) on :
Starbucks is an emissary of evil and that froth that gets everyone so excited is the ejaculate of satan's minions.
Posted by ben (Member # 13) on :
Most people on this forum have probably, at some stage, attended an interminable PowerPoint that asks on about slide 3 "What Will 'Good' Look Like?" It's kind of the same with coffee - we get this whole dreary pantomime of sunday supplement connoisseurship when in actual fact no-one within these islands has the remotest fucking clue what good coffee tastes like. Except when you go abroad and - for some weird reason - the machines in French or Spanish or Italian cafes that look more or less identical to the ones on the UK highstreet actually produce something that's very nice to drink.
Maybe it's one of these on-your-holidays things, like calamare or San Miguel or shorts. I don't know. Starbucks feels like one of these 'lifestyle' purchases, where the brand you're buying into is more important than the heated mud you're paying for. I also hate the little ritual where you get ushered to the round table at the end of the bar and have to hang round like a sore cock until you get your drink brought over - one of the more unpleasant bits of dead corporate space that pepper modern existence.
Posted by philomel (Member # 586) on :
I don't believe I've ever set foot in a Starbucks.
Posted by Bamba (Member # 330) on :
Christ, what the hell am I doing?
[ 12.08.2004, 12:40: Message edited by: Bamba ]
Posted by herbs (Member # 101) on :
Starbucks is just so bland. Its uniform decor in every 'outlet', its cheery 'baristas', its half-assed nod towards fair trade.
But mainly its coffee. You need two shots to even approach what AMT or Pret would give you automatically. Which is a right con. it's all in the roast apparently. Starbucks use cheaper coffee, which can't take a good long roasting. And the food manages to taste of almost nothing. Its as if they blunt the taste part of your mind with their fiendish music waves (which you can also buy at the counter to continue the brainwashing). It must be brainwashing! I still go in them! Not remembering until I get in there that it's a taste-free zone.
Posted by dang65 (Member # 102) on :
quote:Originally posted by ben: when you go abroad and - for some weird reason - the machines in French or Spanish or Italian cafes that look more or less identical to the ones on the UK highstreet actually produce something that's very nice to drink.
It is an odd one that, and less explicable than the French baguette/croissant or Italian pizza which are surely made in a completely different way over there to give you such a clearly superior taste, holiday or not.
I think espresso coffee tastes pretty much the same here, from the times I've had it in a proper coffee shop, but the more advanced concoctions, including basic Cappucino, really don't.
I think it's because we get things like pizza and coffee confused between the European versions and the American versions. It's the American stuff which is being flogged by Starbucks and Pizza Hut. In big European hotels they do "American coffee" (i.e. a big jug stuck to a percolator) and it tastes as uninspiring as it does in the UK.
Anyway, I'm happy with Tesco's Gold Choice - two teaspoons in a mug, boiling water topped up with cold water to make it the right temperature. No sugar, no milk, no marshmallows or marmalade or bananas or whatever. Tastes fine, does the job.
Posted by kovacs (Member # 28) on :
quote:Originally posted by MiscellaneousFiles: Also the Americano is the purest way to drink coffee, as it is undiluted with milk and other such fripperies. Surely this enables the drinker to appreciate and assess the quality of the coffee itself more effectively than if it were polluted with syrups, creams, froths and powders.
that's true enough... there is an argument for drinking tea that way, too. Perhaps it's the case that most coffee you get in London (the UK? who knows -- where does a genuinely French cafe like the one I frequent in Kensington fall into Ben's venn diagram of national coffee standards?) needs milk to make it palatable. Or rather... needs frothy milk, and chocolate dusting, and mocha, and chicory syrup flavouring et al, which makes your point for you.
Posted by Ringo (Member # 47) on :
I've got to be honest actually, I hardly ever go to Starbucks, I generally go to Costa and have a Frapuccino. I think that might make me a **** , I'm not sure. ?
Posted by ben (Member # 13) on :
quote:Originally posted by kovacs: (the UK? who knows -- where does a genuinely French cafe like the one I frequent in Kensington fall into Ben's venn diagram of national coffee standards?)
The complaint I was trying to diagnose exists not so much in the coffee as the drinker. Brought up for most of their life drinking Mellow Birds or somesuch middle class kids usually have at least one traumatic experience of coffee snobbery at university ("that's a funky looking teapot, Peloquin" "You laughable oikunt it's a caffetiere") and thenceforth resolve never to be caught napping on issues of the bean ever again. See also: gourmet cheeses. See also: "cooking for friends".
This Conran-inspired morbid fixation on some bogus mediterraneanish "art of living" has, I would contend, wrecked the self-esteem of a generation and a half of young British adults. When will you realise that the British genius lies not in eating, drinking and cooking, but in writing, singing, playing, building, thrashing and blowing shit up? On this rainswept Protestant archipelago food = fuel. Get used to it.
Posted by discodamage (Member # 66) on :
quote:Originally posted by ben: See also: gourmet cheeses.
ben you muggins. you know that when im comes to the superfluity in our lives of everything-john-briffa-has-ever-said-done-eaten-or-shat i am dilly down wich'oo my niggle. and i think all coffee tastes like dishwater, even the supposedly gourmet organic shit i tried in guatemala which was like, picked and roasted by smiley fairtrade benefitting adults and not 9 year old girls in colourful ethnicical costume and wuma trainers, wizened before their time picking beans for the very company on which this thread is based. it still tasted like complete bunk. BUT! i will not have you dismiss CheeseExcitement as a wanky middle class frippery. cussing people for feeling joyful about cheese is like cussing people for feeling joyful about sunsets, or flowers, or having sex with other people. well, okay, some people are wanky about cheese, but its not the cheeses' fault! you can shoot the messenger but dont close your eyes, ears or mouth to the message: a life without the constant and reliable sense of childlike wonder that good cheese can imbue upon the eater is as dark and cold as a series of scandinavian winters, one after the after and followed by the next.
all i am saying, ben, is give cheese a chance.
[ 12.08.2004, 19:47: Message edited by: discodamage ]
Posted by Vogon Poetess (Member # 164) on :
quote:Originally posted by ben: middle class kids usually have at least one traumatic experience of coffee snobbery at university ("that's a funky looking teapot, Peloquin" "You laughable oikunt it's a caffetiere") and thenceforth resolve never to be caught napping on issues of the bean ever again. See also: gourmet cheeses. See also: "cooking for friends".
Christ, who did you hang out with at university? All my friends just drank tea.
Also, I don't get the PowerPoint "good" thing. Mind you, the only PowerPoints I see are the ones I edit involving words like "flange"*, "thrust", "excitation" and "vibration".
*flange is a rude word, isn't? It should be.
Posted by scrawny (Member # 113) on :
Yes, flange is a rude word. And a great one at that.
I just don't go in there. There's a pret just opposite that does lovely breakfast bars, and a great little independent café round the corner that does great bacon and egg cholla rolls for the truly desperate mornings (like today. Hurgh), and given this degree of choice, I see no point paying through the nose for something that, as Herbs so rightly says, tastes of NOTHING AT ALL.
Also I have a vague premonition that, were I ever to venture across the road in search of a skinny latte and a skinny blueberry muffin that both taste exactly the same, Naomi Klein would hang-glide in wearing a 'Just Say No' T-shirt and kick me really hard. I'm not sure why my anti-globalisation views extend to Starbucks and not to, say, Coca-cola, but they just do. Like I never buy Nike, but somehow Adidas is OK. Finding out Pret was largely owned by McDonalds was a bit of a fucking shock though. Posted by turbo (Member # 593) on :
I used to love Pret! They did this sandwich which was made with sun-dried tomato bread and had this delicious tarragon chicken filling...mmm! The nearest Pret to me was in London, so whenever I ventured into the 'big city' I would run into the nearest Pret and spend way too much money. They also do this freshly squeezed raspberry juice and a yummy carrot cake. Oh, you've made me long for Pret now. The nearest Pret to me is still London, a mere 1-hour flight away.
I find it hard to believe they have anything to do with McDonalds.
Posted by mooch (Member # 730) on :
quote:Originally posted by ben: When will you realise that the British genius lies not in eating, drinking and cooking, but in writing, singing, playing, building, thrashing and blowing shit up? On this rainswept Protestant archipelago food = fuel. Get used to it.
Wow. You guys should incorporate that into the national anthem. That is 100% spot on.
Posted by Abby (Member # 582) on :
Oh god, Diso you just made me very sad (well reminded me of my sadness) that I dont work near the cheese shop anymore.
![[Frown]](frown.gif)
![[Mad]](mad.gif)