Doing ground coffee rubs on meats like steak or bacon or pork tenderloin is a thing. People eat bacon at breakfast and wash it down with black coffee. They're actually pretty complementary flavors, so it all comes down to the exact execution.
It's actually the milkiness of the latte together with the pork that gives me pause. I think it would really come down to the "Dongpo pork sauce" that flavors it all, if it successfully ties them all together. I'm curious what its flavors consist of.
You're paying for the slab of pork and the ability to start the most fun conversation in any room you're in for the following week, when you get everyone to share what they think it would taste like and then you give the big reveal of what it was actually like!
It's just good harmless fun. I'd totally pay for that.
I can't think of a time I've been to a Starbucks Reserve location and felt that the difference amounted to more than slightly bougier interior decorating. Same as any other Starbucks otherwise, and generally the coffee isn't better
Their roastery in Seattle is quite different though and worth visiting since they do have good coffee, interesting merch, interesting architecture, etc.
I mean, that's also a roastery, not just a "reserve" location, and that's the New York location which might as well be the Times Square Apple Store compared to some small town Apple Store.
Other reserve locations, such as this one in Tokyo https://maps.app.goo.gl/diFWHoByG3783V8u5 or this one in Vancouver https://maps.app.goo.gl/HGWsXsinAparQ7bGA are pretty much "slightly bougier" locations that as far as I know don't really have anything unique going on, with the exception that you can sometimes get shitty coffee made in a siphon brewer.
The roasteries always seem to get that special touch though.
Coffee really complements certain fats on my palate. Avocado and coffee taste like magic to me. Some cheeses too. Peanuts and almonds are good too. Bacon and eggs are fine, but not particularly special. I love coffee and a simple 80/20 hamburger with mayo and potato bun.
Coffee has a very penetrating aroma. I suspect putting coffee and bacon in the same container for a few hours to half a day would give you all the flavor you wanted with no caffeine.
The combination of shaoxing wine and light soy sauce (and often black vinegar too) is really common in Chinese cooking, and very tasty. You can marinate meat in a combination of all three, and/or add splashes for flavor when sauteing or stir frying stuff.
Hipster coffee is all about finding nice beans with notes, and process. There isn’t the most innovation in terms of additives unless you consider the glut of alternative milks.
Frankly, I think the independents are happy to cede the “basically milkshake” segment of the market to Sbux.
Australian coffee snob here. I can confirm the emphasis of the specialty coffee industry (which I think you can conflate with 'hipster' coffee) is entirely on sourcing and roasting high-quality beans that have enjoyable and nuanced flavours on their own.
The innovation in the last 15 years is largely around roasting and grinding technology (consistency, control over flavour extraction) as well as inventing cool brewing apparatus for every taste and aesthetic preference.
I did not drink coffee often. But i liked the coffee smell. I tasted it from a portafilter machine, that won me over. Beside that, over those 15 years, the cafe culture has developed a lot worldwide. Those hipster people make everything beautiful, financed by coffee.
I had a beer (an IPA of course) that had freshly grilled bacon in it. A whole strip of bacon, halfway in the beer and flopping over the rim. It was disgusting as you can imagine.
I'm imagining that would be delicious, **IF** it were super super thick cut, super crispy, and with a nice black pepper rub on the outside. And maybe a worcestershire sauce marinade. A bacon swizzle stick.
But when you say "flopping", I'm picturing limp skinny diner bacon, and... ugh.
I'd drink it. Doesn't even sound that strange really. What shocks me is the cost. That's not PPP folks, that is $9.50 USD in a country that most Americans still think of as third-world and full of nothing but sweatshops.
My wife is from Thailand and I've lived there for a while, I've noticed the same thing there with Western fast food chains. We think of KFC, Dominos or Maccas as junk food but over there, they are considered "mid range", as a result they are much cleaner and better staffed, the venues have much nicer seating etc. - this is especially true in regional areas, much less in Bangkok and other urban areas where I guess the novelty factor is long gone.
Which makes sense ... why pay for a foreign franchise and then serve the low-end market, especially when you can just spin up your own brand for that (cf: the entirely undrinkable but very cheap Black Canyon Coffee).
For Thailand specifically, The Pizza Company's[0] back-story is kinda interesting, which is that they used to be the local Pizza Hut franchisee, and then "something happened", and they simply rebranded while serving almost identical menus. The founder, an American-born Thai white guy called William Hienecke[1] is also a super-interesting guy to read about.
Mos Burger and Coco Ichiban are in Bangkok as well, which...I think its still Japanese fast food, but great as well. (we have cocos in the USA, but only in the LA area, while I don't think we have a mos burger here at all)
That's not how most American tech workers and urbanites see China. But I've had conversations, online and off, with people who have no idea how much China has transformed in the last ~25 years. They don't think about it, read about or generally care about it, so their perceptions aren't really updated.
It is weird since my first trip to china was actually 25 years ago (December 1999, so more accurately ~24.25 years ago), and they actually had Starbucks in Beijing back then (at Xidan, I think there was another in guomao somewhere but I didn't see it). Still a bit pricey (I think 35 RMB for a grande coffee frap), and it was the only place in Beijing that I saw any non-Russian foreigners at (but it was winter, not high tourist season for China back then).
You'll see techies who think China is all open modern Shenzhen, and are surprised when they visit and Gmail doesn't work (at least, that was my experience hosting a computer science conference in Beijing in 2011).
China has decoupled a lot more since then. If you visit now I would say paying for things smacks you in the face way before access to Google services does. Recently they've enabled foreign cards so you can pay for stuff in stores with WeChat but it's still something you need to set up. The uninitiated just come and assume they'll use Visa/MC.
I've never been able to use Chinese pay services even when living in China. It used to require a Chinese ID card, which you don't get unless you are a Chinese citizen with hukou.
My wife has wechat/pay, so it won't be a big deal when we go back. Starbucks will take foreign credit cards (or at least they did?), you could suffer at McDonalds though. I wonder if the xiaochi's still take cash?
You can open a bank account in China without any real requirements and thus have a 'local' card. You just need a passport, phone number, and a local address (a friend's is fine).
And yes I think long long ago the WeChat setup would expect a Chinese ID number, but for at least some years now they've accepted passports as an alternative.
But very recently (in the last six months) they've started allowing foreign cards for WeChat pay. So you can add a card and pay for things in store, but not access the more general money transfers, red packets, etc. that people do with it. I guess those have stricter KYC requirements, plus they are keen to stop money getting out of the country.
Smaller places I never _see_ take cash, always WeChat, but I suppose that doesn't strictly mean they won't take it.
You needed a working visa/resident permit last time I opened up a bank account in China (but that was in 2007, a bit long time ago). Linking to a foreign card to WeChat/AliPay would be really convenient, like how I was able to link ApplePay to Suica when I was in Japan (super convenient, but I had to top off manually on my phone, which was a bit annoying).
I'm really wondering how the hole in the wall xiaochis (e.g. 成都小吃, this is mostly a Beijing thing) work now. I'm guessing they would be the first ones not to take cash anymore if they didn't have to.
Nobody asked me for a visa in 2015, and I was on a tourist one at the time so it can't even be some unified database thing they were using. A nice thing about Chinese banks is they can just hand you the card over the counter as well. That would never happen where I'm from in Europe-you have to wait for it to get mailed out to you.
Then again, I often find in China that workers/officials/whatever make up the rules on the spot, depending on what they know how to do, or what they consider too mafan. So maybe some will just 'feel' like you need a visa and others won't.
I get a similar thing in hotels where they can't be bothered to register my passport with the PSB, because they don't get many foreign visitors and so e.g. the computer to do it is not turned on. So they just don't do it.
I would guess you could get a hole in the wall to take cash most of the time, I just never see it done. One problem with cash in China is that the largest note has a pretty low value given how inflation is going and how costs are in tier one cities. Chinese people seem to think this is some kind of image management thing, where if they issue a larger denomination everyone will start freaking out about inflation. But I guess it's moot given how cash is losing favor anyway.
I can imagine it differs between cities. Like Beijing should be the toughest for almost anything, however, while Shanghai is much easier...you don't have to go to the PSB to get your residency permit renewed after every foreign trip, for example.
My landlord used to make me pay my rent in cash, and we have to pay three months at a time. So I would withdraw 18,000 RMB from an ATM to take to my landlord. Thankfully, there are a couple of ATMs in Beijing that let you withdraw up to 10,000 RMB at a time, because when I had to use a normal one, everyone behind me in line was pretty angry. Then I would put it into my man purse, which was really fashionable in the 00s, because cash was king and you needed a lot of 100 RMB bills to buy things.
I think China changes so fast that these fun personal touchstones come and go so quickly. I remember when I was first there you couldn't walk very far without hearing 'fapiao! fapiao!' from people selling them, so there must have been a fair bit of gaming cash-based payments, either for tax or company expenses purposes. Nowadays in Shenzhen I don't see that.
I used to adhere pretty strictly to the rules. Like I'd go register at the PSB as I moved around, all that stuff. At the time I figured, well, it's China, maybe they have some centralized place they're recording all this and they'll approve my next visa faster. But I've met other foreigners who just do not care about any of that, never register, and they get much better visa offers than I do. It's just a huge chaotic machine really.
You can talk to one official who'll tell you it's literally impossible to do X, where X is some thing that massively impacts your life there. Go to a different office or speak to a different person and oh yeah, you want to do X, no problem, and it's done in five minutes.
That drives some people crazy but I recommend anyone to experience China at least once in their lifetime. It's a very perspective-changing place.
It got to the point that I registered with the PSB twice a year: first before I would renew my Z visa, and once after I renewed it (so twice in one month basically). Because my registration permit would become invalid when I went on international trips, but it didn't really matter until I went to renew my visa, and then my permit would become invalid again with the new visa, so that's what I had to do.
Different PSBs in Beijing had different policies though, Haidian was looser than Chaoyang (or at least the ones I had in each, both Haidian and Chaoyang are huge and probably have multiple ones).
Before I lived in China for 9 years, I spent two years in Switzerland. You do not want to mess with the contrôle des habitants, Swiss police/officials are not very understanding. I delayed my exit from Switzerland for one week (to attend a conference) and it became a huge deal even if Americans are firmly on visa waver. Mostly the opposite of China.
You can now use Alipay tied to a US debit card. I did it last month and it works fine; the biggest obstacle is your US bank may get jittery and require a couple of phone calls to unblock the debit card. Setting the whole thing up takes less than five minutes.
Most Americans don't even have a passport and have never left the country apart from Canada/Mexico. But to be fair I find Chinese people's views of America are equally based on cliches.
Fancy pour-overs in the U.S. can cost more than $15 for a small cup. The people buying those aren’t the same as the ones complaining that the standard drip at their local spot is now almost $4. And similarly, the target market for spending 68 kuai for this at the Starbucks Reserve in Shanghai probably aren’t among the most price-conscious Chinese people.
While you're at SB, suggest a new UX or even new POS system.
UX tip screen doesn't say what to do, and selection arrows are tiny. Then, you have to hit the green enter button at bottom of pad (no prompt, and it's not green anymore after 1000 uses). People keep pecking at the screen thinking it's touch. I hit the wrong button, so cashier tried to fix it and unplugged it.
Boot time is 3 minutes. Of course, it locked up on the IP address screen so took another reboot.
> Its biggest competitor in the country famously has a cheese-flavored latte.
Actually Starbucks has that too, you can get it in 7-11. It's not like it has a 'Cheesy' flavor though; more of a creamy dairy thing to it. 'Cheese' is a pretty common addition to dessert drinks in China and to my Western tastes is pretty good.
Can't be worse than bacon vodka [1] - probably not as bad as you imagine, but I still tossed back the bottom half of the shot in a hurry and didn't ask for another.
Gotta keep the gimmicks coming. Or just train your baristas on an Italian espresso machine and use fresh roasted,
lighter roasted beans. But the brand is gimmicks.
It's a little bit of a gimmick. If you can't get fresh coffee to every location on earth, at least you can dilute the flavor with pork juice.
That said, mixing stuff with coffee does have precedent. Espresso mixed with milk is something that no coffee snob would call an abomination. Maybe pork juice is an even better add-in than milk? You don't know until you try.
Their offerings could be reduced to charging quite a lot for dairy or dairy adjacent products, paired with generally the same F tier beans you'd get at any place that was started in the 90s, especially the Italian ones. The espresso machine probably doesn't make much of a difference, but what they use serves their purpose well.
Grinder and machine makes a difference. Starbucks use a fully automatic (grinds, doses, comoresses etc.). I don’t think state of the art there has caught up with the classic machine (when I say classic there are still a lot of computers etc innit!)
I think they get what they can out of their beans, the blonde roast actually isn't so bad black, but it's just that their beans aren't generally suited to being drunk without some kind of fatty dairy adjacent product. You grind and prepare commodity cheap beans in the best way possible and you'll pretty much get a similar result.
Reminds me of the smbc comic about how "pumpkin spice" doesn't contain pumpkin, and could just as easily be called pork spice. Except this has actual pork flavour.
Unrelated but can someone explain to me, on the way into the office the local Starbucks had a coffee with olive oil I think? Is this not as absurd & crazy as it sounds? What the heck is going on?
They mention that drink in the article, so it's not unrelated.
And while I'm sure there's traditional culinary heritage that a Starbucks PR employee can point to as well, their olive oil coffee is just an upmarket answer to the popularity of butter coffees (most popularly branded as Bulletproof). Instead of just adopting that trend, they tried to lean into a more artisanal, cultured brand by highlighting its use of olive oil instead of butter.
So, I tried the olive oil coffee once because why not?
My conclusions:
* It needed salt
* I needed a piece of bread to dip in.
By this, I mean that the olive oil used was very nice, but it felt like drinking warm olive oil, not coffee.
The nice thing about the whole endeavor is that I now have a recurring purchase in Amazon for the olive oil they used in the coffee, so I consider that a win.
Doing ground coffee rubs on meats like steak or bacon or pork tenderloin is a thing. People eat bacon at breakfast and wash it down with black coffee. They're actually pretty complementary flavors, so it all comes down to the exact execution.
It's actually the milkiness of the latte together with the pork that gives me pause. I think it would really come down to the "Dongpo pork sauce" that flavors it all, if it successfully ties them all together. I'm curious what its flavors consist of.