Coffee Here and There

Yes, let's return to the vexed issue of coffee. Australia versus France. Knickers will be twisting already...

Vietnamese iced coffees, Sunny Café, Merimbula, New South Wales.

Since we have been living overseas café culture has blossomed in Australia, and it's lovely to see. Even the smallest towns have at least one thriving café, and many have two or more. My home town has three, for a population of about 3300. The cafés that do the best are those serving breakfast burgers, good house made savoury pies and the sort of cakes that look traditional and home made, like your granny would have made. 

However, since we have departed the sunny shores Australians have taken to boasting about the quality of their coffee, and that's not so lovely. That's just parochial, tedious and irritating.

 Roses Café, Goulburn, New South Wales.

In the majority of cases the coffee available in Australian country towns and big cities alike disappointed us. Most of the coffee we were served was faintly flavoured foamy hot milk. We tried asking for extra shots of coffee, but it made no difference. In the end I realised that it was not entirely the coffee that was the problem. It was the enormous quantity of foamy hot milk plonked on top of it that was the main culprit. Bear in mind that we were not asking for 'lattes', we were asking for 'flat whites', and we were not asking for 'large', just 'medium'. Finally we resorted to asking for milk on the side and that more or less solved our problem. 

 Cakes, Bottlebrush Café, Pittsworth, Queensland.

The French aversion to milk in coffee must have been absorbed by us to some extent I think. I was quite repulsed by the quantity of milk that it appears most Australians habitually consume in their coffee. The French are more tolerant of dark bitter roasts too, and we found most of the Australian coffees a bit bland.

 

Iced coffees, Garden Café, Tenterfield, New South Wales.

Flavoured milk drinks are available everywhere, and I had a strawberry one for old time's sake. It was a lot of milk and I struggled to finish it! On the other hand I also had an old fashioned strawberry milkshake in a down and out roadhouse, which was excellent. You just can't tell until you try with this sort of childhood nostalgia. 

 

 Bakery/café, Adaminaby, New South Wales.

On the whole, cold milk drinks generally worked better for us. Because it was hot much of the time we opted for iced coffee, something most of these cafés can do well, and a treat for us because it's not something you see so much in France. The best was in a Vietnamese takeaway in Manly. 

The best hot coffee I had was in the National Portrait Gallery café in Canberra.

The best coffee I've had since our return to France? That's to be had in the Bar Restaurant de l'Image, just round the corner from where we live. The proportion of coffee to milk is good, and a flat white tastes like coffee, not milk. Mathieu, the owner and barman, says the milk is important though, and he always uses milk from our local dairy co-operative Laiterie de Verneuil, as it is higher in protein than the milk from Poitou that our shops also stock.