come to japan and give up coffee
Coffee in Tokyo, and I mean AN COFFEE , costs on average $5. No joke. What’s even more hilarious is that it is consistently the worst coffee I have ever had in my entire life.
Kissaten-de, resuturan-de, nandemonai. It’s all gross, and never not gross, and never in the same way twice. I hated the coffee in Puerto Rico, but they consistently made it a certain super-strong way that had to be served with milk and sugar, and I could chalk that up to the taste preference of a different culture.
No, the “consistently the worst coffee” designation belongs to a country that stabs around wildly at coffee and espresso-brewing, having no concept whatsoever of how to produce a drinkable cup. I had a few lattes around Shibuya that were mostly burnt in their espresso content and unbelievably hot — in one case leaving the [soy] milk utterly flat, it was so over-steamed.
In an upscale-seeming mall cafe, I was served a “cappucino” that was probably the same swill they pump out at Tim Horton’s — a powdered milk-based coffee-extract concoction jam packed with sugar.
To make something good, you have to know what good is, or at least have some idea — an ideal to uphold. The Japanese have NO IDEA about coffee.
The ideal of coffee in Japan is simply to HAVE coffee, and to present it in a certain way. The actual content seems, to the Japanese, completely irrelevant.
Now, TEA in this city, on the other hand… that’s another story.
Basically, if you want to give up coffee, come to Japan for a week. If the crapfully crapful cuppa you keep getting served doesn’t get you, the $5 to $7 price tag will.
