The quest for a good flat white has long been a conversational staple for Australians overseas, more democratic than the progress of any national team, less fraught than federal politics, a sure-fire way to stake out common ground.
Coffee, it seems, is an increasingly important part of our national identity. Take the latest excruciating in-flight safety video from Qantas, introduced last year and promoted as “a quick induction on Australian culture”.
While my hopes for a catastrophic runway accident usually reach their peak during the implausible seatbelt tutorial in which a friendly New York cabbie guesses a woman is Australian because she sits in the front seat of his taxi, the scene in which a pair of finance bros order double flat whites from an Aussie barista in London just as cringey. “Big night last night?” she simpers as they giggle like schoolboys at a petrol station magazine rack.
One of the pair then turns to the camera and says, “your aircraft has great coffee too”, which rather undermines the enterprise even for those it might have appealed to. But the association has been made – Australia’s coffee culture is now a major export. From Montreal to Mumbai, Australian cafes are on their way to the kind of global ubiquity enjoyed by sushi restaurants and Irish pubs.
As in much else, New York has led the way. As early as 2014, the Times dubbed the proliferation of Aussie coffee shops “an invasion”. Last year the US food website Eater ran a list of “12 Bloody Good Australian Cafes in NYC”. Twelve? Really?
Then there’s Bluestone Lane, the logical corporate endpoint of the movement. The fast-growing “Australian-inspired” US chain slings smashed avocado and flat whites to punters at more than 50 branches in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Toronto and Grand Cayman. Last year it secured millions in funding, including from the owner of the Miami Dolphins, and plans to open dozens more locations.
There’s a certain irony to this. When Starbucks attempted to conquer Australia in the 2000s it ended up losing $105m. A decade on, the tale has become a TED talk, a national source of schadenfreude and a know-your-market fable for people who buy management books in airports.
In contrast to the American chain’s Central Perk aesthetic, the new Australian cafes abroad – and I admit I’ve visited quite a few – share a self-conscious, Instagram-friendly look. Their eggs are garnished with micro greens. Their carefully designed one-page menus nod tastefully to home without overdoing it (brekky, avo, sanger). Their bright interiors glow with inevitable blonde timber, indoor plants and pastel tableware.
Whenever I go to one, I’m overcome with a mixture of shame and relief. Relief because I’m guaranteed to enjoy my breakfast. Shame for the same reason; I don’t want to be the sort of traveller who can’t do without the comforts of home, like the Brits who eat baked beans each morning in Benidorm.
The clientele always makes me feel even more uncomfortable; they’re more interested in photographing their food than eating it. (Mostly this is intolerable because I have to pretend like I didn’t plan on posting pictures of my own meal – #homesick.)
But what interests me most about these outposts is that they present Australia in a particular light, as a place a lot like the homogeneous Byron Bay of the Gram, where everyone knows your name, the lighting is ever-perfect and the avocados always ripe.
This doesn’t line up with the real Australia, of course. It doesn’t reflect our diversity, our complexity or our other big new export – a shamelessly cruel system that aims to return people in need of protection to persecution and terror. But you don’t expect that in a venture capital-funded coffee shop. They’re selling a fantasy.
It’s just that the fantasy strikes me as empty. And not even particularly Australian. We didn’t invent muted tones, natural light and latte art, and we sure as hell don’t have a monopoly on them.
Worse is the fact that, aside from the food and coffee, these outlets have stripped away the very things that make going to a cafe in Australia enjoyable. For starters, the informality we take for granted mixes poorly with North America’s demanding service culture. If you’ve ever tried to seat yourself at an American restaurant and experienced the smiling, barely contained fury of a “hostess” you’ll know exactly what I mean.
More obviously, the laid-back Australian cafe was never going to survive contact with the North American workplace. Australia might not be a workers’ paradise, but many Australians make a living wage in hospitality. That economic fact changes the relationship between customer and server. It’s a lot harder to pretend the barista is your mate when she earns barely enough to keep her head above the poverty line and could be fired at any moment for the most trivial infraction.
What’s left? Good coffee and a canvas for Instagram. Not a place to relax, but a place to anxiously project your relaxation to others. Not a place that helps to create a community, but a place that helps to create your personal brand.
Overseas Australian cafes are hardly the only places that embody this ethos – see: the whole world now – but their uniformity surely speaks to the way we’re viewed and the way some of us want to be seen. I’ll pass on that vision, but it is nice to find a decent flat white.
