Hard News: Food Show 08
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Did someone mention the Simple Cottage? The *only* thing edible in that place was the nachos. I had blocked the memory of the macrobiotic brown rice vego "sushi rolls" out of my mind till now.
DKD did the hot chocolates of awesomeness, fab coffee, and kindly hosted us queer kids on Sunday afternoons. Dominos did do coffee and some nice cakes - the food was slop (except for soup). I have fond memories of Midnight Espresso et all in Wellers in the late 80s.
The "most remote" good coffee experience I've had in NZ is in Kohukohu - some of those old hippies are still there, and are now doing excellent things with coffee.
Monmouth Coffee in London is still going strong, but I was peeved with them when I went back a couple of months ago, because they *still* don't do soy milk. I need a latte sometimes - there are only so many espressos I can drink in a day (one). There's a new chain in London called AMT, and they're pretty good, with very tasty fairtrade organic offerings. And soy milk. I'd say they're a bit like Sierra in quality. And there's one at Terminal One in Heathrow right at the arrivals area. There's also good kiwi coffee (and Anzac biscuits) to be had a surf/ski/outdoor shop around the corner from Covent Garden - it's down one of those alleyways leading towards Neal St, the cafe is on the top floor, free internet and for the life of me, I can't remember what the shop is called.
I second the recommendation for Campos in Newtown in Sydders. I walked past the place any number of times before finding it (why isn't it *right* on King St? Gah!) - best coffee in Sydney, and I agree that finding decent stuff in Melbourne is a lot easier. Canberra has two places that make decent coffee, a few "ok" and a local roaster who likes a dirty acid flavour for his beans, which is a shame. There are other local-ish roasters, but no cafes using their beans, as far as I know (other than their own stall at the farmers' market at the showgrounds on the weekends - shame about the 10 minute queues, though).
As for the coffee vs tea dichotomy, it's a false one. I like beautifully extracted locally roasted fruity chocolatey arabica coffee whereever I can find it; I like my personal blend of Assam and Sri Lankan Organic Highland teas first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It's all what tastes good, innit?
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Dominos, if its the one I think you mean. They used to do great vegetarian lasagnes, back in the days when I was experimenting with vegetarianism (well, experimenting with vegetarian women would probably be more accurate).
Lol.
Yes, it was Dominos I was thinking of. Good tofuburger.
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In Auckland, DKD opened in 1985, I think. There were a few other places serving espresso (what was the health-food plae in Lorne St?), but it's generally agreed that you can trace the Auckland cafe culture from there.
I think the most of the DKD crew would agree (my wife is an ex-DKD staff member, and studied the history of coffee in Ak for her design degree... I've been given long dissertations on the history of coffee in the city) that most credit goes back to Craig Miller although I note that Derek disagrees.
There was also good espresso being served in Tommy Adderley's place up by the library, the Judith Barragwanth owned place in Vulcan lane, another Vulcan Lane downstairs cafe with pinball machines, and the glitzy, mirror filled, half hairdressing salon place next to the Herald in Queen St, all in the very early 1980s.
Then there was John's Diner at the top of Swanson St which deserves it's own place in our cafe timeline.
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Oh, and just in case you thought going to Gloria Jean's for your chain coffee was cool, it ain't.
As The Fundy Post has pointed out, the chain supports the really creepy Mercy Ministries.
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The downstairs coffee bar in the University Union in Dunedin had an espresso machine in the 1960s - but they sold filter coffee.
I used to frequent the Van Dyke (downstairs in George Street, just round the corner from the Octagon. Long gone), and the Little Hut (downstairs further along George Street, and still there) in the 1960s, and I'm sure they both served espresso coffee. Coffee culture in Dunedin is older than you think.
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I'm also happy to see that cheese rolls are still a popular cafe food down here!
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Sue,
I admit to loving starbucks mint iced decaf coffee and mint hot chocolate
and sometimes i'll choose starbucks over a loca cafe if i want a hot choclate
the problem with wellington
everyone is such a coffee snob, the humble hot choclate is often looked down upon, and what you get is hot milk with a teaspoon of cadbury's drinking choclate (so not nice)Also I've never had a surly person at starbucks, but let's be honest wellington is famous for it's surly barista's and sometimes it just get's old feeling like i owe the barista something forcing them to make not coffee.
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I hear you about Starbucks Russ, our kids didn't realise until we took them to Northern Italy. When we got back and they went with their friends to Starbucks they came back complaining loudly about how crap the coffee was.
We are fortunate here in Dundee to have a good coffee and tea merchant. Their continental roast is not quite up to Italian standards but it isn't far off and much better than most of the coffee chains. With one offspring boomeranging back soon I shall have to lay some more in.
it has been more years than I can remember since I last set foot in a McDonalds and then it was to take the kids when they were little and I did not partake. I intend to make that true for Starbucks. One problem is that if you don't want an espresso it is hard to get something that isn't frankly too large. Too much horrible coffee just adds insult to injury.
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I've forgotten two of the biggies from Dunedin - Stewart's Coffee House, who roasted and ground their own coffee, in the 1970s. They were downstairs (again!) in the lower Octagon. A wonderful smell would waft up the stairs when you walked past, and whisk you down for a brew. The company still exists, but as a coffee supplier, based near the university.
And then there was Cowells, the originator of the famous Cowells pavlova. They started in lower Stuart Street, over 40 years ago. The cafe which occupied the shop after they left closed a couple of weeks ago. -
i should add that i don't hate starbucks, but neither do i buy their product.
Unlike American tourists travelling to Sydney for the 2000 Olympics who were famously told by a US travel advisory website that good coffee could finally be found in Sydney now SB had arrived.....
There is a great piece in last month's Wired, which touts the new Clover coffee machine which SB's USA are investing in heavily to try and turn things around. after a multiple page puff-piece which tells is exactly why it's better coffee, what the new process involves and a whole lot more, the author is then asked to compare the diffrence between the old and the new.He tries both and after being prodded by the guy from Starbucks and finally ends the story by saying he can tell the difference..it's the taste of hype.
No. I was totally up for the equivalent weasel coffee when I visited Vietnam last year, but no bugger had heard of it.
Rp2,000,000 ($20) a pot just down the road from here. I've yet to try it.....
Blake is right, the local Kopi kinda weens one off the espresso. And it's so easy...kopi grounds, hot water. The great irony here is that the Indonesians regard Nescafe as a delicacy and it sells for more than the good stuff.
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while he ate weird grey cubed fruit out of a tin down here in the South Pacific.
And that's not all... the famous tinned fruit salad from a certain Hastings' food processing plant contained peaches, pears, possibly pineapple (that'd be the grey cubes) and cherries - only the cherries were strange little, hard green things, possibly of fruititious origin, but dyed glorious pink.
Oh, the memories - school holiday seasonal employment amongst the fruits - and omitting to remove the wetas from the tomatoes that made the sauce....
bon appetit, y'all
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Oh, the memories - school holiday seasonal employment amongst the fruits - and omitting to remove the wetas from the tomatoes that made the sauce....
Finally, a response to all my friends and relatives who see my refusal to eat tomato sauce as unpatriotic!
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Lucy, they used to stack the ginormous bins of tomatoes outside the factory wall in the stinking hot sun. They were then scooped onto a huge conveyor belt which trundled them indoors, where the willing workers picked off and discarded the rotten, bird-pooped, weta'd, spidered and otherwise unwholesome ones. Ditto the peaches, but they went through a steam clean first, so they were ok.
Good money tho - shift allowance, overtime, i think we even got gumboot money.
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quality European-style coffee introduced in the last century to Australia by immigrants, especially from Italy
I wish some of those same immigrants (or, I guess in aussie: "Damn Immos!") made it as far north as the UK. Even starschmucks here is lousy - burnt, too hot, and generally average. But they are everywhere - not as much as the US, but still obvious.
Go Monmouth in Borough, I say! £1 for an espresso which is pretty much perfect.
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I can't say i'd have spent $3000 on a coffee machine myself
And yet you wonder why not everyone can make good espresso when a "munter" like yourself can.
When it comes to espresso, good kit is important.
I would far rather have a decent plunger cup than a bad espresso, and the latter is often the product of badly tuned grinder/machine setup that can't be fixed without arsing about. True, a good barista should be fiddling with the settings on grinder and machine to do so, and they do have input into the outcome, but if the grind and the machine are right, all they should be doing is tamping the shot and timing it. If you are fiddling with these things in pursuit of the god shot, then you have lost the right to call yourself a munter.
It is a lucky punter at home who can do it with their cheap-arse Breville grinder and a department store espresso machine.
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Oh, and any discussion of Starbucks is never complete without Foamy the Squirrel
http://www.scarysquirrel.org/special/movies/foamy/sml1.html
Possibly mildly NSFW.
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Good money tho - shift allowance, overtime, i think we even got gumboot money.
That is an earlier New Zealand that no longer exists. I was shocked to discover, several years ago, that labouring on a building site pays just what it did when I was a student years ago, but without any allowances or extra time.
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That is an earlier New Zealand that no longer exists
Too right. It was a very long time ago, back in the day when wharfies, woolstore workers and meatworkers did pretty well. I remember a mate of mine, a seaman who worked on the interisland ferries, but lived on Waiheke Island, (as did a few others) - the Railways paid their return flights from Auckland to Wellington to get to work!!
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I used to work at DKD circa 1990 baking cakes, and it was an oasis to me, but does anybody else remember Blondies Cafe or the Island of Real? I used to frequent those places during the early eighties, and yes, let's not forget John's Diner. Chocolate Revenge on the menu and Heroes in German on the jukebox... Brilliant.
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Fantastic coffee nostalgia, thanks folks. I was reliving staring through those latticed windows onto Queen St from old DKD, visiting their undersea loo, and surviving those stairs.
Also pre-drag Urbi Et Orbi, pinball at Brazil and Verona. Midnight Espresso, Matterhorn, nights at Havana when the bar still smells like a Cuban plantation. Thick hot chocolate from Il Buco's slushy machine. Quadruple shot shortie from the Arc. Discovering that even Palmerston North has more than one reliably good cafe these days.
back in the days when I was experimenting with vegetarianism (well, experimenting with vegetarian women would probably be more accurate).
Ah, Mr Hosking. I fondly remember both the lasagne and the impressive staff of Dominoes, not that I ever had any romantic success. I think wee novelist Kelly Ana Morey was one of them, wasn't she?
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Ouch. Perhaps I might have been taking Starbucks as an excessively low baseline for comparison. At least, several places manifestly better than Starbucks as far as I have been able to gauge over the last four years. I presume this wasn't Dunk you're talking about?
Oh, I believe the place has changed hands so name-and-shaming is (I hope) unfair. But while I take my food (and coffee) seriously without being pseudish about it, I don't care how good the consumables are if the service is bad. Yes, being a good waiter is a damn hard job (and one I'd be crap at, to be frank) but (this is a true story) when I'm treating my better half to a romantic bithday dinner it's nice if we actually get what we order. And waiting twenty-five minutes for a round of indifferent coffees in a near-empty cafe. Not on.
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I'm beginning to think that this coffee snob debate is reprised here every couple of months just to keep the sponsors happy...
But while I'm here - while in NZ it makes sense to drink good coffee, and therefore avoid Starbucks. But before travelling you should just ween yourselves off the stuff entirely. Otherwise you'll end up EXACTLY like those blinkered mid-western American tourists desperately seeking McDs and doughnuts from Tashkent to Ouagadougou.
Besides, there are some truly fantastic awful coffee experiences to be had out there, like the way South Indian waiters do the whole Tom Cruise-in-Cocktail number while they pour sweetened condensed milk, warm water and coffee syrup from one stainless steel tumbler to another. Who cares what it tastes like? -
I'm beginning to think that this coffee snob debate is reprised here every couple of months just to keep the sponsors happy...
But while I'm here - while in NZ it makes sense to drink good coffee, and therefore avoid Starbucks. But before travelling you should just ween yourselves off the stuff entirely. Otherwise you'll end up EXACTLY like those blinkered mid-western American tourists desperately seeking McDs and doughnuts from Tashkent to Ouagadougou.
Besides, there are some truly fantastic awful coffee experiences to be had out there, like the way South Indian waiters do the whole Tom Cruise-in-Cocktail number while they pour sweetened condensed milk, warm water and coffee syrup from one stainless steel tumbler to another. Who cares what it tastes like? -
I do love coffee, just in case that wasn't clear. And love is what Starbucks and anyone whose heart is not in it will never deliver. That's a difference you can taste as well as feel, and it's worth paying for.
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Oh, and just in case you thought going to Gloria Jean's for your chain coffee was cool, it ain't.
As The Fundy Post has pointed out, the chain supports the really creepy Mercy Ministries.
All true; anti-gay, fundamentalists with an entrepreneurial flair. Bizarrely, they set up in Newtown. Bizarre because Newtown's famously and flamboyantly gay-friendly, bizarre because they've set up 50 metres from Campos which serves easily the best coffee in Sydney and bizarre because even McDonald's gave up on Newtown. It's still there but; populated mostly by international students from nearby Sydney Uni accommodation.
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