“What’s your name?”
When people misspell it as “kangaroo”, the answer isn’t so straightforward.
That’s why Kantaro Okada goes by “Ken” or “K” when grabbing takeaway. The operator of various Melbourne cafes (279, Le Bajo Milkbar) isn’t alone in disguising his identity. “Everyone has a coffee name at our office,” he says. “Because they have Japanese names.”
Adopting an easy-to-spell alternative for takeouts is understandable when your name is commonly mistranslated (I’ve had “Lee Tran” creatively interpreted as “Leerog” and “Heelicha” while picking up meals). Enter the coffee name. The Iranian US cookbook author Samin Nosrat uses “Sam” for convenience and Associate Prof Sukhmani Khorana can relate.
“I feel like I have no choice but to use ‘Su’ or ‘Sue’ as my coffee name,” says Khorana, who edits the Food, Culture and Society journal and works at University of New South Wales’ School of the arts and media. “Coffee names may be a curious phenomenon for those with very recognisable Anglo names but it is a taken-for-granted everyday reality for many Australians who are considered to have difficult-to-pronounce ethnic names.”
Rowena Chansiri from Sydney’s Ickle Coffee embraces such names as conversation starters. “How do you spell it? What’s the origin?” she might ask. It’s a nice way to interact with customers. “But every cafe is different,” Chansiri says. She runs a neighbourhood cafe. “We’re not in so much of a rush.”
Chansiri once worked at a busy cafe where staff were “not allowed to ask for names on the cups”, she says. Instead, they drew shapes that needed decoding. A circle with a cross would signify an order for a man with glasses. It didn’t “make sense to me”, the barista says.
What about using numbers instead of asking for names? That feels “very sterile”, Okada says. It suits fast-food franchises but people go to cafes “because they want human interaction”. “Keeping the name part is quite important in that sense.”
Sterility isn’t the only problem with numbers. People don’t remember them, says Junji Tai from Sydney’s Brighter Coffee. He believes in the name-giving approach, despite receiving typos himself: “They usually autocorrect my name to ‘Junkie’.”
Starbucks, where coffee and fast food intersect, is famous for messing up names. Last month the US reporter Wolf Blitzer had a Venti skim latte order delivered to “Oof”.
Chansiri says: “People actually look forward to what Starbucks [baristas] write.”
Sometimes a customer will refuse to give a name. Tai says. “That’s fine. We’ll call out ‘strong flat white’, no problem.”
As someone with a “difficult ethnic name”, opting out altogether is appealing. I usually use my boyfriend’s Anglo one-syllable name instead of my own. But isn’t burying my cultural heritage with a western name kind of sad?
Tai also sees the opposite phenomenon: people choosing alternate identities because their Anglo name is too common.
“We’ll be calling out, ‘Thanks Matt, thanks Matt, thanks Matt!’ So [someone] … will say, ‘Can I put my name down as Batman?’ I’m like, of course you can.”
Tai’s approach is to say, “Can I get a name for the order?” – so people can decide what they’d like to be called.
Okada says some customers recite a phone number or say “123” instead. Chansiri’s partner, who is Filipino, resorts to his middle name – “just Tom” – when ordering.
But common western names still attract errors. The food writer Howard Chen has an Instagram series dedicated to this: he’s received orders for Harwert, Harassed and Ou!
And Irish names might be spelled correctly by one staff member, Tai says, then read out by someone who “might not be able to pronounce” them.
So is it better to use a fake identity for convenience? Or should I embrace what my Vietnamese migrant parents called me, even if it causes difficulties? “It’s OK if you don’t use it for a transaction,” Okada says. “For a coffee, I don’t have so much of a policy to use my name. The ease of the transaction is important for both the baristas and the customer.”
Some cafes yell out the coffee order (“regular soy latte!”) but that’s not error-proof either.
“Last week we had three Matts in a row that had strong flat whites,” Tai says. That’s why a nickname like Batman can be handy.
“I’m still waiting for Superman and Spider-Man. Maybe you can be that.”
