- Michael Barbaro and Andrew Martin's "Overhaul, Make It a Venti" about Starbucks, NYT
I first had Starbucks's when I was 13, in 1997, after school one day at the store on Union Square East. I had a Tall Frappuccino, because I wanted the smallest size, and because all my friends were having some other version of the Frappuccino, either with mocha or with caramel or with crack. My friends and I liked the upholstered chairs there, and we would play card games while we sipped away at our drinks ladened with sugar and caffeine. The barista, or rude asshole, as we knew him, would make snide comments like, "Don't you kids have homework or something?" because we required him to rinse out the blender for every single one of our drinks, since no two were the same. We were kids; we didn't want to have the same kind of Frappuccino as the next person. That would have been lame.
The thing is, I don't think we ever felt like it was a mom-and-pop home-away-from-home kind of place. It was a place where we paid for drinks that were expensive, and it was a place that provided us with a table and seats until it was late enough to go home and do homework. For $3.42 or however much it was to get a Tall Frappuccino those days, it was a cheap babysitter, if anything. While there, we didn't smoke pot, or have unprotected sex, or steal, so I guess ingesting a whole bunch of caffeine was the lesser evil. No, but it didn't make us feel like this was a warm place where we could have enjoy our beverages uninterrupted, and at anytime, could have wrapped ourselves up in throws, curled up with a good book, and quietly dozed off. It was a freaking Starbucks, and the reason we were there was because it was better than the MacDonald's across the street where the janitor yelled at us for sitting crosslegged in the booths. From the green aprons to the printed napkins to the interior design theme, it felt damn corporate from the first step in to the last sip before we stepped out to head home.
Geoff Vuleta, chief executive of Fahrenheit 212, an innovation consultancy in New York, said Starbucks had lost focus on the experience that drew customers in the first place by neutering the baristas and by crowding the stores with merchandise, or as he put it, “replacing mystique with relentless commerce.”
“We all remember our initial encounters with Starbucks: the exoticism of new language, space, sounds and smells,” Mr. Vuleta said in an e-mail message. “Fast-forward a decade, and the first thing that jumps out is that the mystique that so thoroughly defined the initial experience is conspicuously absent — trampled in the stampede of proliferation.”
Where did the NYT find these people? When you go to France, you are bombarded with "the exoticism of new language, space, sounds and smells". When you step into Starbucks for the first time, it smells like COFFEE. The exoticism of its language is broken down into three words denoting size, one of which means BIG, and the rest is just espresso and its few dilutions. From memory, our "barista" from the get-go was already a eunuch, and the music was never more than innocuous, immemorable tunes. I have such a problem with people who try to be bleeding hearts and who try to lament every damn thing that's "not as good as it used to be". Starbucks was never that good. At least not by the time it was common enough that we found one in every neighborhood we lived.
I had my first espresso when I was in eighth grade, in 1996, and it was bitter, but fragrant and nutty. I had no idea how much better it can taste until years later, but the flavor of espresso is something I distinctly did not associate with any of Starbucks's drinks. I was a freshman in college before I saw that my Grande Skim Latte was actually a drink with two shots of espresso and a messy pour of skim milk topped with that anemic, stiff looking foam. It was a matter of ritual that my friends and I went to Starbucks in college, since there was one right in the building next to our classes, and since it took our electronic meal points. Once we grew beyond having meal points on our ID cards, most of us stopped going there and opted for other better cafés.
As we all grew up and grew out of Starbucks, I attached myself to two espresso joints: Zibetto on 6th and 56th, and Ninth Street Espresso. They served more potent and flavorful brews, and each espresso drink came out like its own little dream. The milk was not milk, nor was it foam. It was some viscous, molten solid that neither splashed nor sloshed in the cup. When the baristas poured, the steamed milk joined the espresso and lolled around until the mixture reached the brim. Will I get a rosetta leaf today, or a heart? Even if it's just a random squiggle, I would be happy. From the first heady sip, to the last lick of espresso foam, as Martin Crane on Frasier said in the episode where he accidentally eats a pot brownie and gets the munchies, "you taste that and tell me that’s not better than a woman."
No comments:
Post a Comment