You may have started the wheels of industrialism, but we grind the coffee
As a Melbourne child you are taught a few absolutes. AFL is better than rugby. A picnic is better than surfing. And good coffee is the liquid gold that runs through the perfectly gridded streets of our city.
When I recently moved back to London I started taking notice of London absolute truths. Londoners love cupcakes. (They would eat mud if it was presented in a patty pan). Londoners get to see the most majestic buildings every single day. Londoners call gumboots ‘wellingtons’ (and have made them the fashion staple of every winter). London is packed to the brim with strikingly diverse creatures, who buzz through H&M and suck the tap dry at 5PM. Londoners homes are narrow and five storeys high, they hope the rules of density keep them upright and steady all night. London cannot find its summer, even in the lost box of global warming. Hampstead Heath is a wonderful forest worthy of your very best wellingtons.
And,
you guessed it,
most* Londoners don’t care about good coffee.
Londoners bustle through the streets, holding cups belonging to the many global coffee chains which, as an Australian and conscious consumer, I was always taught to hate. We hate Starbucks just as much as we hate politically correct comedy – both are too weak and made of sugary syrup. In London these chains are everywhere, over packaged and over packed. Poor, poor London.
Alas, there is hope for a Melbournian coffee snob living in London. Fear not, your fix of legal addictive drugs is, indeed, available in excellent form.
St.Ali, London
There are a bunch of Australian (and New Zealand) owned cafes winning the hearts of Londoners without the Brits even realising it. After doing some research not only did I find proper coffee in London, but I realised that all of the hipster cafes in London were actually owned by happy little Vegemites. Or if not owned by us they all have lanky, dark, dreamy baristas who don’t give a shit about an English Breakfast.
With awesome names such as ‘Ginger and White’, ‘Lantana’, ‘Flat White’, ‘Nude’ and our brother from another mother, ‘St.Ali’, these places are the best spots for coffee in London. Yes, we brought Kylie to their radios and flat whites to their blood stream. The fact that they are dotted throughout the city makes me think that there was once some preconceived plan. I imagine an urban planning meeting where a whole lot of Aussies sat around a round table, like the knights of English past, and decided that the only way to protect our own was to make yummy soy lattes throughout the land…
So, as I take a sip from my third flat white of the day and wipe my brow of caffeine sweats, I would like to assure you. Come to London and be merry. Do not fret, because you will be looked after by baristas who care. Baristas who are taking their pounds to an Aussie bank. Baristas with the Southern Cross tattooed on one arm and the queen’s face on the other. Baristas who still call Australia home.
*Be very careful Zoe, ‘most’ will make sure those exceptions are accounted for.
Another London absolute, Londoners know how to be painfully polite but they also know how to bite (sometimes simultaneously).
