One to ten pounds a head, a 4.7, and a quiet acknowledgement that this country could not make a flat white until it was shown how
Beany Green is an Australian cafe on the Southbank. One to ten pounds a head – the cheapest bracket in this entire survey. A 4.7 from three hundred people.
And it is here, along with several hundred others, because the British could not make coffee and had to be taught.
The intervention
Before the Antipodean arrival, British coffee was a national embarrassment. It was instant, or it was a burnt americano from a chain, or it was a cappuccino with an inch of dry foam served at a temperature that would strip paint.
Then, through the 2000s, Australians and New Zealanders started opening cafes in London, and they brought with them a coffee culture that was already twenty years ahead – properly extracted espresso, milk textured rather than foamed, and a drink called the flat white that this country had never heard of and now cannot function without.
Within a decade the flat white was on the menu of every chain in Britain, including the ones that had spent twenty years serving something worse and pretending it was Italian.
The Prat’s beverage desk regards this as the single most successful and least acknowledged cultural intervention in modern British life, and notes that this country’s entire coffee competence was, essentially, imported by people from a former colony who could not believe what we were doing.
The brunch problem
They also brought brunch, and we are less grateful.
Australian brunch culture gave Britain avocado on toast, the poached egg with a swirl of something, and the queue – the enormous, patient, uncomplaining weekend queue outside a cafe, which did not exist here before and now defines Saturday morning in every gentrifying postcode in the country.
We accept the coffee. The Prat’s position on the queue is that it was not part of the deal.
The Southbank
It sits on the riverside, in the middle of the greatest pedestrian flow in London, and it charges one to ten pounds, which given what Skylon upstairs charges is either heroic or an error.
A 4.7 from three hundred people on a site with that much footfall is a genuinely impressive number. Volume destroys ratings – we have said it since Fatt Pundit – and Beany Green has taken the volume and held the score.
The flat white, defined, since nobody agrees
Espresso, and steamed milk, textured to a microfoam rather than whipped into a stiff foam, in a smaller cup than a latte, with a higher coffee-to-milk ratio and essentially no dry foam on top.
That is it. It is not a small latte. It is not a cappuccino without chocolate. The difference is the milk texture, and the reason British coffee was bad for fifty years is that nobody here knew how to texture milk and everybody was too embarrassed to ask.
Australia and New Zealand have argued for forty years about which of them invented it, and they will not settle it, and both of them are considerably more interested in the argument than in the drink.
Verdict
Cheap, quick, extremely good coffee, and a standing reminder that this country was rescued from its own beverages by people who flew eleven thousand miles and could not watch it any longer.
Order a flat white. Say thank you.
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
*Withnail and I* ving de wanhoop. Dit is de geschreven versie.