So I can’t see why not. Particularly since you can always buy the stuff retail (though I’m not sure why you would want to — you’d be far better off with a local roaster).

Excellent review of my article, the points and critiques you raise are spot on. Brief note of explanation: the name comes from the fact that I’m based in Istanbul, seven hours ahead of the East Coast, so I can get up and do a column that appears before 6:00 a.m., so you can read it with you first coffee in the morning. Of course I’m usually on my third by then…

The point you raise questioning how important customer service really is does have merit, the Part II of my column, coming today, is going to argue that a lot of people (he said from experience) prefer rather anonymous service, and are uncomfortable with “Hi Frank!” every time they walk in the door.

Not exactly Soup Nazi service, but more, ah, coolly professional. Smile, hand the coffee over and shut up. My wife and I ran a coffee shop in Antalya, on Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, for a couple years before moving up here in January, and we learned which regulars wanted to sit at the bar and chat and which preferred simply to be left alone. I believe that this is providing the finest customer service these people want — sometimes less is more.

For people like yourself, who obviously have the taste bud capacity where subtle grades of differentiation in the cup itself matter, customer service isn’t such a big deal, as you correctly point out, if balanced out by superior java, but the majority of people can’t tell the difference between Kenyan AA and Sumatran and go to coffee shops for the overall experience; to them the service, the atmosphere, heck even the music is very important.

I like your analogy of Starbucks and perestroika, what’d be interesting is to research out just what happened in New Zealand, I think. My wife’s a Kiwi, she said they were used to just drinking Nescafe until about 1990, when she left for Turkey. She came back around ‘93 and found you couldn’t just walk into a coffee shop and order either a cup of coffee or cappuccino anymore, which were your two options the way “white” or “red” are your two wine options in even fine Istanbul restaurants today, you had all these flat blacks and long whites and whole chalkboards of names she’d never seen.

We were there over December/January, I’ve never seen a place with such consistently high quality of coffee shops anywhere. Never seen a place with such consistently beautiful scenery anywhere else either. But it’d be interesting to know what happened in New Zealand in the early ’90s to so rapidly raise the country’s coffee awareness so high, it wasn’t Starbucks like it was everywhere else. Any historical insight?

And I might steal your description of what a coffee shop doesn’t have to be in today’s piece. It bothers me when people try to pass of “slovenly” for “comfortable” and “cheap” for “authentic.”

Keep up the good work,

David Sims