Barista: "Would you like your Cappuccino on the dryer side, or wetter side?"
Me: "Dryer Please."
"I tend to like them more on the dry side too."
"Cool. But do you aim more for volume, or texture?"
"Oh! Texture! Definitely!"
"That's what I like to hear!"
"Yeah, I like it to be the consistency of shaving foam."
"That sounds wonderful."
Mom interjects with pride: "He's a Barista too!" [with a heavily trilled "r"]
"Oh cool! Where do you work?"
I provide a short description of my coffee experience.
"That's cool. Yeah, even when I go somewhere else I can always tell when it's not aerated enough, just by the sound! It's terrible! It gets so loud!"
At this point I begin to get excited.
"But I was trained at Star****'s before I came here, so..."
"Oh. Um, cool."
This is what I was promised:
This is what I received (but a higher volume):
Yeah.
Your point?
ReplyDeleteSooooo snobby. It's interesting because my brother in law was trained at *bux and is just as snobby AND makes delicious drinks. I have been convinced by him that it comes down to it 1)being an authentic *bux in the first place and 2)the management.
ReplyDeleteHaha, I totally agree.
ReplyDeleteI'll confess, *most* of my anti-Star****s statements are meant facetiously. My reaction to her statement was really one of nervousness. She stated it as though it somehow gave her credibility, but I have never gotten a consistent product from Starbucks employees (and have had to retrain a couple who thought they were the bomb because they worked at Starbucks): some are really great, others are not. In most cases, those that are, have taken it upon themselves to advance their skill in their chosen craft. So she saying to me that she knows how to steam milk properly because she was trained by Starbucks is equal to someone saying "I can pull a god shot because I worked at Dilworth/Batdorf/Counter Culture." While the first half may or may not be true, it has very little to do with *where*.
I also will admit that I have large coffee corporations, such as Starbucks, Caribou (which is vastly better quality than Starbucks), to thank for making an American coffee industry possible. Though they have little or nothing to do with what the industry has become.
And the point of the post was not, in fact, to make fun of Starbucks (as everyone seems to have interpreted it), but to say that she has a very poor definition of shaving foam or properly aerated steamed milk are, made herself sound wonderful, and served me a disappointing beverage.
[Please read a jocular tone into the above passage]