Opinion
Terrible French coffee is causing controversy in Paris. I’m not surprised
Ben Groundwater
Travel writerThe Italians are mad about food, which isn’t that surprising. There’s an entire social media account dedicated to Italians (and people claiming Italian heritage) getting irate about the global desecration of their national cuisine.
So, you might be wondering, what are they mad about now? And the answer is that this time it’s not technically food – it’s coffee.
France is responsible for some of the world’s best food, but terrible coffee.Credit: Getty Images
The Olympic Games are on in Paris right now, which means athletes, media and fans from across the globe are gathered in the French capital. Most people are enjoying themselves, though an Italian swimming commentator made headlines last week when he complained, on air, that the coffee served in the press room was so bad it was probably made with water from the River Seine.
A few days later, someone snapped a photo of an espresso machine that the Italian commentary team had purchased and brought in themselves to enjoy decent coffee while they worked.
The only surprising thing about this whole episode, surely, is that the Italians were surprised. They live right across the border from France – they must have realised the coffee there is terrible?
For a nation that basically invented modern gastronomy, French coffee sucks. It sucks when it’s bad, but it even sucks when it’s supposed to be good.
When Australians travel, like the Italian commentators, we want good coffee, and we expect other countries to have it.
French people, I’m sure, will disagree. Sacre bleu, they’ll say: you’re just going to the wrong places. You’re ordering the wrong thing. You’re a tourist and you’re ordering a cafe au lait – or worse, a cappuccino – from some place on the Champs-Élysées, and you’re just getting a steaming bowl of vaguely coffee-flavoured milk.
To which I would reply: that’s not what I’m doing. I know my cafe au lait from my cafe noisette. And the coffee I’m served in France is still, generally, terrible. (Also, why do those bad, milky coffees even exist? No tourist to Australia is being served something like that.)
I’ve always marvelled at how bad the coffee is in France. The French make some of the best food, and definitely the best wine, in the world. They have the most sophisticated cafe culture on Earth. They also share a border with Italy, the home of excellent coffee.
What gives? You have to assume that everyone in France actually wants their coffee to be overly bitter or thin or far too diluted, which might be the weirdest thing of all.
But France isn’t alone. Spain, also the home of world-beating cuisine, also a producer of great drinks, also not exactly far from Italy, makes really bad coffee. Way too bitter. Way too hot. The German-speaking regions are not much better.
Admittedly, of course, this column is penned by someone worse than an Italian for this particular whinge-y niche: an Australian. And Australians have quickly become the world’s most painful coffee snobs.
Did you catch any Australian athletes at the Olympics complaining about the coffee? Unlikely. That’s not because they’re overly forgiving or chill, it’s because the Australian team didn’t just smuggle in their own espresso machines, they brought their own baristas.
This is not a joke: the Australian team brought with it all the usual sporting equipment, and the science-y things, and also three living, breathing people to make everyone their flat whites.
If the Italian commentators are chasing a decent cappuccino (let’s be real here: an Italian cappuccino is pretty much the same as an Australian flat white), they should don a green-and-gold shirt and sneak into the Aussie camp.
This, again, shouldn’t be a surprise, because Australia does good coffee across the board. There aren’t many bad flat whites or long blacks out there any more, save for a few regional outposts and major-chain service stations.
So when Australians travel, like the Italian commentators, we want good coffee, and we expect other countries to have it.
Spoiler alert: other countries do not have good coffee. The US, for all its progress in the likes of the Pacific Northwest, mostly does really bad, too-sweet, too-milky, too-big coffee (although, on the bright side, you do have to pay an incredible amount of money for it).
Canada gets its coffee from chain Tim Hortons, which is all you need to know.
The UK has been improving of late, thanks to a certain former colony’s embrace of coffee culture, though if you wander into a Costa or a Caffe Nero (or another of the UK’s many coffee chains), best of luck to you.
New Zealand’s coffee used to be good, but – don’t hate me, Kiwi friends – something weird has happened over there in the last few years. Everyone has started over-roasting their beans, giving the coffee – even silky-smooth flat whites – a bitterness more commonly associated with a losing sports team.
Which countries are good? Argentinian coffee is high-quality, thanks to Italian migration. Ethiopian coffee is excellent. Vietnamese coffee is great, as long as you don’t mind the sugar hit. Coffee in Japan is very good, because everything in Japan is very good.
Even the Italians wouldn’t get mad there.
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