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Comment by pjmorris | Hacker News Reader

> If you're ever in Australia, try Pepe Saya on fresh sourdough!

As it happens, I will be in Australia for a bit next month. This is the kind of intelligence I find invaluable. One thing I like doing as a tourist is going to grocery stores to see how locals eat. What else should I be looking for? [Insert joke about Foster's here :)]

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I haven't experienced it first hand, but all my ozzie and kiwi friends are bragging about how good their coffee is. All the gourmet types I served them are not up to snuff according to them. So give that a try. :)

I work in the coffee industry so maybe I'm a bit jaded here, but most of the edge in coffee that Australian's can claim to comes from that particular snobbishness that coffee seems to bring out in some people.

Don't get me wrong, you can get great coffee in Australia and they do genuinely care about it. But you can't get better coffee than you'll get by visiting a "third-wave" specialty coffee shop in any big city around the world. What you will get is a stronger helping of "our coffee is better than everyone else's" served alongside your cup. For a real sneer, if you dare, go into Melbourne coffee shop and order an Americano instead of a long black. Or maybe you'll get lucky and meet less condescending baristas there than I did. I certainly hope so.

> most of the edge in coffee that Australian's can claim to comes from that particular snobbishness that coffee seems to bring out in some people.

Well put and extensively documented in this short but worthwhile snapshot:

We've opened the edgiest most exclusive cafe in the whole world - and it's always closed...

Welcome to The Closed Cafe. [1]

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqw09I-BTvE

Ha that's great, thanks for sharing.

Aunty Donnas has a whole range of Melbourne cafe sketches too

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ChB2gn6rE4s

This one's my favorite

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=EtLL30fO4gk

> For a real sneer, if you dare, go into Melbourne coffee shop and order an Americano instead of a long black.

That's stupid, it might be impressive they know the difference, but what if I actually wanted an Americano? (Hot water added, vs espresso pulled into it in a long black.)

I'm not so snobbish as to care (and I prefer lungo anyway - long shot all brewed, no pure water added) it just seems to me if they're going to be like that then they should recognise they're different and offer both. 'Certainly sir, or if you prefer we can do a long black too' sort of thing, acknowledging that the customer may be just as snobbish/knowledgeable, but accustomed to ordering Americano because 'long black' would generally furrow eyebrows.

I do think in hindsight I may have experienced it though, in the UK - I didn't order, but my aunt or someone was told they don't do Americanos and came back with a filter coffee or something. At the time I thought they were just incompetent ('do you do espressos? Hot water?' I would have not been able to resist retorting) but now I think probably it was similar to your experience. Stupid.

> At the time I thought they were just incompetent ('do you do espressos? Hot water?' I would have not been able to resist retorting) but now I think probably it was similar to your experience. Stupid.

Yup, your aunt got a dose of coffee snobbishness I'm afraid. The worst I've experienced recently was when several of us went into a specialty coffee shop that I'd been recommended in Saigon. All except for one ordered ordered coffee. My last friend can't handle anything with caffeine so she asked what other drinks were on the menu. There were none, no non-coffee drinks and no decaf either. Eventually we asked what the ~5 year old child on the table beside us was drinking. Babychino (foamed milk). Great, it's not on the menu but she'll have one.

They charged us $6 for the babychino, or more even (180k VND I think). When we complained they pointed out the tiny print on the bottom of the bill that there's a surcharge for anyone who doesn't drink coffee. Imagine if a bar did that.

Where did you go in Saigon where you got such a high fee (or a fee in general for not having coffee)? I’m genuinely curious as in my experience, even at really touristy specialty coffee places the coffee based drinks were no more than 80k, and never had a fee for someone who didn’t drink something with coffee, so a fee so high sounds strange. Admittedly all the cafes I went to had some kind of juice, so it wouldn’t have been a problem in any case.

As a coffee snob with lots of Aussie and Kiwi friends, you _can_ get equally good coffee in other places, but in places like Melbourne and Wellington fantastic coffee is ubiquitous. In other places (e.g. London where I am) you have to go looking for it.

This. Excellent espresso can be found somewhere in most cities, but in Melbourne it is ubiquitous.

My litmus tests for coffee shops is to order a batch brew (if they don't do that, anything that's not based of an espresso). Good beans and proper machine maintenance can be tasted very well in the humble batch brew.

If you're American, buy some bread while you're here. Ours is much more "bread" and less "sugar cake".

There are bakeries in the US, you know.

It depends where you live... It's definitely not like England and France where there's usually (always?) a bakery close by.

Dedicated bread bakeries aren't that common outside of major US cities but the larger supermarket chains often have in-house/local bakeries which have products that aren't bad.

In both Australia and the US, mass market/supermarket bread is crap. Of course there's plenty of decent sourdough etc to be found (Sonoma etc), but you have to look for it and it will cost you a pretty penny.

I, like many, made sourdough during the pandemic, and vastly prefer it to our native 'sugar cake.' I'll be on the lookout.

We have nice bread in the US. Sometimes people outside the US don't realize the massive amount of choice we have here. There are like 50 different kinds of bread in the supermarket I go to. Unbleached organic flour is also readily available if you'd like to make your own bread. There's 10s-100s of types of fresh vegetables probably. There are organic variations of almost every available vegetable and herb as well. We have pretty good regulations around food labelling, so you can find healthy things. You just have to be vigilant. It isn't that hard to eat a diverse, healthy diet, once you know what to avoid. Bad things to eat do exist here though, and they're quite addictive. I think our car centric culture lends to eating fast, processed things. You can eat a full diet of rice, beans, vegetables, and meats very cheaply in the US. It gets about 2x more expensive when you go for organic foods, though. It's still significantly cheaper to eat a healthy diet of all unprocessed organic foods than it is to regularly eat at restaurants.

Before I had an interest in researching a healthy diet I made poor dietary choices. I don't think the good choices are always immediately obvious. I also spent about 3x my normal time in the supermarket when I first started eating healthy. If you live somewhere with few grocery options you may have to drive pretty far. When I was a kid we commuted 40-50 miles (1hr drive) to go to a better, cheaper grocery store.

I'm not sure I put much stock in the "organic" label which I mostly won't pay a premium to buy over the alternative. Though I do mostly buy fresh ingredients.

But to your original point, yeah, there are a ton of bread choices in a typical supermarket and, with few exceptions, I never buy the plastic-wrapped from the major manufacturers and buy something made in-house or otherwise locally or one of the "craft" breads from some other local company.

(The price difference isn't even that huge. It looks like a loaf of Wonder bread (stereotypical American white bread) at my local supermarket is $3.50 while better breads aren't necessarily more than $5--which isn't nothing for someone pinching pennies but isn't a huge premium either.

Not the OP, but a kiwi, and here are mine:

- Marmite. Not too much, just a light spread. Try it with eggs. - Eta Munchos, spicy tomato flavour (NZ based, but you may find them) - a pie from a bakery - tim tams - whitaker's chocolate - anzac biscuits

Or toast, salted butter, Marmite, and cucumber

Glad to see the Vegemite heathens haven’t made it to NZ ;)

never heard of it

Nobody drinks Fosters in Australia. Not sure if you can even get it here.

(Also, most grocery stores here do not sell alcohol — you go to the 'bottle shop' for booze. Legal drinking age is 18.)

No, aussies go to the grog shop!

Is it just a European (UK & France I'm most familiar with) thing that supermarkets sell alcohol? Seems weird to me when they're separate shops, but I'm realising it is perhaps most of the world?

In the US it varies by region. In most places you can buy beer and wine in grocery stores, while hard liquor is a different matter, generally sold only in package stores, sometimes state-run. But not always. I've seen stacks of Jack Daniels bottles in Louisiana convenience store.

Liquor varies. I've seen it in numerous Safeway's on the West Coast for example. Beer and wine is still far from universal. Massachusetts still has some screwy related laws. I think only a limited number of stores in a chain are allowed to sell beer and wine. I think there may also be some exceptions for stores close to the border with New Hampshire.

I’d recommend looking up a local farmers market if you can, the stuff in the supermarkets isn’t anything special most of the time, whereas you can find some amazing bread / cheese / butter etc at the markets. Also some pretty average stuff, but you might get lucky :)

> What else should I be looking for?

Definitely have a VB. And Tim Tams.

'Victoria Bitter?' If so, looking forward to it!

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