A completely unnecessary but deeply satisfying investigation into five pounds fifty for a flat white, conducted purely in the name of journalism.
There are four coffee shops within an eight minute walk of my flat, which is either a sign of a thriving local economy or a sign that everyone on this road has completely lost their minds about hot bean water, and this week I decided to find out which by visiting all four in a single, faintly deranged day of research.
The first one does a flat white for five pounds fifty and serves it in a cup so small I initially assumed it was a sample. It was not a sample. It was the entire drink. I drank it in roughly three sips and spent the rest of my visit staring meaningfully at the empty cup, willing more coffee to appear through sheer force of disappointment.
The second place, to its considerable credit, gives you a genuinely generous portion for roughly the same money, and the staff remembered my order by my second visit that same afternoon, which either speaks well of their attentiveness or poorly of how many times I’d already been back that day. I’m choosing to believe the former.
The third shop has clearly decided that ambience is the actual product and the coffee is just the ticket price of admission, all exposed brick and moody lighting and a playlist that made me feel, for eleven minutes, like the protagonist of a film about someone quietly falling apart in a beautiful way. The coffee itself was fine. The vibes, genuinely, were doing quite a lot of the heavy lifting.
The fourth place undercut everyone at three pounds eighty and, infuriatingly, the coffee was just as good as the five-fifty version, proving what I think most of us already suspected, that a meaningful chunk of what we’re paying for on this particular street has very little to do with the actual beverage and quite a lot to do with the specific type of morning we’re trying to convince ourselves we’re having.
I don’t have a grand conclusion here beyond: know your coffee shop, know your own psychology, and if a five-pound-fifty flat white arrives looking suspiciously like a sample, you are well within your rights to quietly grieve.
For more on the broader London cafe economy and what it says about how this city actually spends its money, there is a decent overview at News Satire Sites.
More from this author at Lowri Griffiths, prat.uk.