The World Is Flat White

“What’s a flat white?” I asked the Balinese barista. Her response involved microfoam, various types of espresso shots and calculus. Having already asked too much to back out, I ordered one. It blew my world wide open.1Said conversation took place at Seniman Coffee Studio, which I highly recommend if you’re a hipster, coffee snob, or, well just happen to be in Bali.

The flat white is an Australian invention that’s been around Southeast Asia for the better part of four decades. It was the thing I missed most after I moved back from Bali to the US. So imagine my pleasant surprise when it sprang up in Starbucks, which hails it as “bolder than a latte” yet “smoother than a cappuccino”—perfect for those of us who have declared neutrality in the longstanding latte-cappuccino wars.

I headed right down to my neighborhood Starbucks in Sparks, Nevada, and purchased a flat white. It was delicious. I thought to myself, “You mean that for the low, low price of $3.95, I can have this taste in my mouth every day? Done.”

Yet by the time I had finished drinking it at home, my enthusiasm had dissolved somewhere into the 16-ounce plastic cup. Because although Starbucks made the same drink I remembered, they had utterly failed to replicate the experience I had when I first drank one. This is, I admit, an unfair standard to hold a coffee chain to. They’re in the business of selling caffeine and sugar to overworked Americans, not reproducing a Balinese coffeehouse.

America has been defined by its imports. It is, after all, a nation of immigrants, who brought with them food and furniture and ideas. Irish, Italians, Cubans and Chinese—all have left a mark on this country, not just with their products, but with their presence. You can buy a Cuban sandwich in Miami from an actual Cuban. The most commercial Irish bars still usually have an actual Irishman or Irishwoman tending bar. And Chinese immigrants created perhaps the only authentically American food.

But I didn’t buy my flat white from Paul Hogan2Paul Hogan is most famous in the US for playing Crocodile Dundee. He is most famous in Australia for not paying taxes on all the money he made playing Crocodile Dundee.—it was just a 19-year-old who no doubt believes the drink is from Austria and that Paul Hogan used to be a wrestler.3Because, you know, young people these days. The flavors of the outside world have been brought to me after first being divested of their spirit and divorced from their original context.

Context is important with coffee because I don’t enjoy coffee—I enjoy the ritual. The sound of steam, the scent of the beans, the feel of fingers around warm porcelain. Most of all, in those salad days when I first discovered the flat white, I enjoyed sitting at a communal table and listening in on five different conversations that, every 10 minutes or so, would overlap as everyone assessed the burning question: “Shall we have another?”

The flavors of the outside world have been brought to me after first being divested of their spirit and divorced from their original context.

But that is how it goes. I’ve eaten sushi in Sudan, visited Disneyland in France and eaten baguettes in Brazil. I count none of these as authentic experiences because they all prompted me to say, “It’s good—it’s just not the same.”

As I wrote in a previous post, I miss a world that is really real, and I want to believe that the authentic world exists somewhere out there, anywhere but here. Yet authenticity is not a hard and fast concept. Like beauty, it is in the eye of the beholder. And somewhere, an Australian is reading this and saying, “They can’t make a decent flat white in Indonesia. It’s just not the same.”

References   [ + ]

1. Said conversation took place at Seniman Coffee Studio, which I highly recommend if you’re a hipster, coffee snob, or, well just happen to be in Bali.
2. Paul Hogan is most famous in the US for playing Crocodile Dundee. He is most famous in Australia for not paying taxes on all the money he made playing Crocodile Dundee.
3. Because, you know, young people these days.