Smell the coffee

There is, I understand, an established principle to the effect that you can throw all the weighty, serious stuff you like at media audiences; and then discover that what really gets them fizzed up is something quite trivial.

I demonstrated the principle for myself on my blog recently, when, between posts leading with commentary on the select committee inquiry into TVNZ and the care of the mentally ill in the community, I complained about being served a bad long black (no crema!) in a trendy Wellington cafe. I noted a story in the Listener that observed that you still couldn’t get a decent coffee in London, excepting that it be at a New Zealand-run establishment.

It was all on. I received, and published, about 10,000 words of anguish and ecstasy from New Zealanders in London, Aberdeen, Liverpool, Switzerland, Sydney, Spain, Montreal and Los Angeles. There were tales of sipping brews in Brazil, Cuba, Vietnam and Utah (“uniformly disgusting coffee”) and the good oil on the best coffee on home soil (take a bow, Toasted Espresso of Barry’s Point Road, Takapuna). People didn’t just care, they cared a lot.

This preciousness of the palate would once have been seen as repugnant to the Kiwi character. This was, after all, a place where restaurants were virtually illegal, where we made a practice of boiling to death the world’s finest ingredients. In Democracy at Ease: A New Zealand Profile, a book to which I often find myself referring, former British Liberal MP David Goldblatt bemoans “the plain fare and even plainer fetch and carry of the normal feeding machine of this country” in the 1950s and expresses his anguish at forever being fed “the same dull sandwiches”. He doesn’t say so, but it’s safe to assume that you couldn’t get a decent coffee either.

Yet now, in 2006, you can get a decent coffee in parts of the land where you can’t even get TV3 reception. That fact is largely a consequence of the efforts of a group of oddball entrepreneurs who began opening cafes in the 1980s and then moved onwards and upwards into importing, blending and roasting their own beans. Caffe L’affare, Sierra, Karajoz, Miller’s and the others — they all started small.

Many of them took a further step: into the supermarkets, where their products displaced imported brands. Others developed businesses in the most unlikely places: at this year’s New Zealand Coffee Festival Awards (contested by no fewer than 40 roasting companies) the big winner was Kerikeri-based Max Coffee, which took three of the eight prizes.

These entrepreneurs have forced middle-market players to follow them or miss the boat. They have created vibrant, bustling city institutions like Cafe Astoria and Caffe L’affare. They have largely fended off the mediocre, multinational chains that spread like weeds in most Western cities. (There are 162 Starbucks stores within a five-mile radius of the top of London’s Regent Street; about the same at many points in Manhattan. In Auckland? A few, largely in shopping malls and strictly for squares.)

The coffee crusaders have also done something less tangible but more notable: they have created a national culture so vigorous that when expats dream of home, they dream of long blacks and flat whites, made properly.

But is that all there is? A cluster of small and medium-sized businesses, trading exclusively on home turf? The London experience suggests that perhaps it’s time for another step up. Quite a few of my readers declared London’s best cafe to be the Flat White in Berwick Street, Soho. It is owned by New Zealanders, who unabashedly play to their countrymen by serving the best of the Edmonds Cookbook (Anzac biscuits! Ginger crunch!) and etching a silver fern into the creamy top of their flat whites. Others nominated The Providores (Kiwi chef Peter Gordon’s place) or just establishments where a New Zealander was known to be piloting the espresso machine.

As a New Zealander who writes for The Economist pointed out to me, Flat White has already received very warm notices from the likes of the Financial Times. There would seem to be potential to take it to the world. But how? The Australian-owned Muffin Break chain has stores throughout Britain, but seems to have quality-control problems related to its franchise model (“They make a dreadful long black,” my Birmingham correspondent advises).

Here’s my plan. While Italy will always be the true home of the espresso, there’s a case for saying that the best coffee-with-milk in the world is made in New Zealand. So why not bring together the country’s largest export business and its small espresso entrepreneurs? One side would provide distribution, marketing and capital, the other would bring taste, style and individual character. The stores would enjoy the benefits of corporate backing without the crushing mediocrity of the franchise model.

You heard me, Fonterra: go to it. And when you open your first, brilliant cafe in London, you can fly me over. I’ll tell you if the long black is good enough.

russb@dubwise.co.nz