Starbucks $10 pork-flavored coffee
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
Doing ground coffee rubs on meats like steak or bacon or pork tenderloin is a thing. People eat bacon at breakfast and wash it down with black coffee. They're actually pretty complementary flavors, so it all comes down to the exact execution.
It's actually the milkiness of the latte together with the pork that gives me pause. I think it would really come down to the "Dongpo pork sauce" that flavors it all, if it successfully ties them all together. I'm curious what its flavors consist of.
I can't vouch for the caffeine content though. Don't think you can replace your morning brew with it...
Their roastery in Seattle is quite different though and worth visiting since they do have good coffee, interesting merch, interesting architecture, etc.
https://www.starbucksreserve.com/en-us/locations/new-york
That photo doesn't look anything like your average Starbucks interior.
Other reserve locations, such as this one in Tokyo https://maps.app.goo.gl/diFWHoByG3783V8u5 or this one in Vancouver https://maps.app.goo.gl/HGWsXsinAparQ7bGA are pretty much "slightly bougier" locations that as far as I know don't really have anything unique going on, with the exception that you can sometimes get shitty coffee made in a siphon brewer.
The roasteries always seem to get that special touch though.
Its very expensive for the average Chinese person and is considered fairly fancy or upscale. At least it was when I lived there.
Same rule applies to Pizza Hut.
It's just good harmless fun. I'd totally pay for that.
Only once, obviously.
Coffee, ginger, scallion and soy sauce might not be it for me.
Ginger I'm dubious of but I'm open to being pleasantly surprised.
Scallions? No sir, I'm out.
Poking around online, I do see some non-traditional red-eye gravy recipes that also add milk.
Bacon and chocolate is also a well-established pairing.
Honestly, assuming you can deal with the oiliness, I think bacon flavor would work great in a coffee drink.
Do you have a recipe?
I'm truly surprised the pork/bacon craze of the past few decades in the US did not produce pork&bacon coffee.
I feel like the beanie wearing SF/Portland/Seattle hipsters let us all down. My question to them today would be: What would you say...you do here?
Frankly, I think the independents are happy to cede the “basically milkshake” segment of the market to Sbux.
The innovation in the last 15 years is largely around roasting and grinding technology (consistency, control over flavour extraction) as well as inventing cool brewing apparatus for every taste and aesthetic preference.
But when you say "flopping", I'm picturing limp skinny diner bacon, and... ugh.
It is not difficult to find Halah food in China, just that Halah certified isn't a thing that most people/merchants care about.
Non-muslim Chinese love pork, it is by far the most commonly eaten meat in the country.
In fact so much so that the meat has an outsized role in Chinese inflation. For example outbreaks of diseases among pigs can cause inflation to skyrocket and collapses in prices can bring similar problems. See e.g. https://www.ft.com/content/058df2fe-ae7a-4be8-93c6-ca9cb46d3... or https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-02-03/china-eco...
In any case, Starbucks in Asia is pretty upscale compared to the US. It serves a different (and wealthier) demographic.
You'll see techies who think China is all open modern Shenzhen, and are surprised when they visit and Gmail doesn't work (at least, that was my experience hosting a computer science conference in Beijing in 2011).
My wife has wechat/pay, so it won't be a big deal when we go back. Starbucks will take foreign credit cards (or at least they did?), you could suffer at McDonalds though. I wonder if the xiaochi's still take cash?
And yes I think long long ago the WeChat setup would expect a Chinese ID number, but for at least some years now they've accepted passports as an alternative.
But very recently (in the last six months) they've started allowing foreign cards for WeChat pay. So you can add a card and pay for things in store, but not access the more general money transfers, red packets, etc. that people do with it. I guess those have stricter KYC requirements, plus they are keen to stop money getting out of the country.
Smaller places I never _see_ take cash, always WeChat, but I suppose that doesn't strictly mean they won't take it.
I'm really wondering how the hole in the wall xiaochis (e.g. 成都小吃, this is mostly a Beijing thing) work now. I'm guessing they would be the first ones not to take cash anymore if they didn't have to.
Then again, I often find in China that workers/officials/whatever make up the rules on the spot, depending on what they know how to do, or what they consider too mafan. So maybe some will just 'feel' like you need a visa and others won't.
I get a similar thing in hotels where they can't be bothered to register my passport with the PSB, because they don't get many foreign visitors and so e.g. the computer to do it is not turned on. So they just don't do it.
I would guess you could get a hole in the wall to take cash most of the time, I just never see it done. One problem with cash in China is that the largest note has a pretty low value given how inflation is going and how costs are in tier one cities. Chinese people seem to think this is some kind of image management thing, where if they issue a larger denomination everyone will start freaking out about inflation. But I guess it's moot given how cash is losing favor anyway.
My landlord used to make me pay my rent in cash, and we have to pay three months at a time. So I would withdraw 18,000 RMB from an ATM to take to my landlord. Thankfully, there are a couple of ATMs in Beijing that let you withdraw up to 10,000 RMB at a time, because when I had to use a normal one, everyone behind me in line was pretty angry. Then I would put it into my man purse, which was really fashionable in the 00s, because cash was king and you needed a lot of 100 RMB bills to buy things.
I used to adhere pretty strictly to the rules. Like I'd go register at the PSB as I moved around, all that stuff. At the time I figured, well, it's China, maybe they have some centralized place they're recording all this and they'll approve my next visa faster. But I've met other foreigners who just do not care about any of that, never register, and they get much better visa offers than I do. It's just a huge chaotic machine really.
You can talk to one official who'll tell you it's literally impossible to do X, where X is some thing that massively impacts your life there. Go to a different office or speak to a different person and oh yeah, you want to do X, no problem, and it's done in five minutes.
That drives some people crazy but I recommend anyone to experience China at least once in their lifetime. It's a very perspective-changing place.
Different PSBs in Beijing had different policies though, Haidian was looser than Chaoyang (or at least the ones I had in each, both Haidian and Chaoyang are huge and probably have multiple ones).
Before I lived in China for 9 years, I spent two years in Switzerland. You do not want to mess with the contrôle des habitants, Swiss police/officials are not very understanding. I delayed my exit from Switzerland for one week (to attend a conference) and it became a huge deal even if Americans are firmly on visa waver. Mostly the opposite of China.
My wife is from Thailand and I've lived there for a while, I've noticed the same thing there with Western fast food chains. We think of KFC, Dominos or Maccas as junk food but over there, they are considered "mid range", as a result they are much cleaner and better staffed, the venues have much nicer seating etc. - this is especially true in regional areas, much less in Bangkok and other urban areas where I guess the novelty factor is long gone.
For Thailand specifically, The Pizza Company's[0] back-story is kinda interesting, which is that they used to be the local Pizza Hut franchisee, and then "something happened", and they simply rebranded while serving almost identical menus. The founder, an American-born Thai white guy called William Hienecke[1] is also a super-interesting guy to read about.
UX tip screen doesn't say what to do, and selection arrows are tiny. Then, you have to hit the green enter button at bottom of pad (no prompt, and it's not green anymore after 1000 uses). People keep pecking at the screen thinking it's touch. I hit the wrong button, so cashier tried to fix it and unplugged it.
Boot time is 3 minutes. Of course, it locked up on the IP address screen so took another reboot.
Actually Starbucks has that too, you can get it in 7-11. It's not like it has a 'Cheesy' flavor though; more of a creamy dairy thing to it. 'Cheese' is a pretty common addition to dessert drinks in China and to my Western tastes is pretty good.
That said, mixing stuff with coffee does have precedent. Espresso mixed with milk is something that no coffee snob would call an abomination. Maybe pork juice is an even better add-in than milk? You don't know until you try.
You can drink it?
Pineapple on pizza?
And while I'm sure there's traditional culinary heritage that a Starbucks PR employee can point to as well, their olive oil coffee is just an upmarket answer to the popularity of butter coffees (most popularly branded as Bulletproof). Instead of just adopting that trend, they tried to lean into a more artisanal, cultured brand by highlighting its use of olive oil instead of butter.
My conclusions:
* It needed salt
* I needed a piece of bread to dip in.
By this, I mean that the olive oil used was very nice, but it felt like drinking warm olive oil, not coffee.
The nice thing about the whole endeavor is that I now have a recurring purchase in Amazon for the olive oil they used in the coffee, so I consider that a win.