When visiting an unfamiliar place, finding good coffee is perhaps one of the most complex things a person can do. I don’t mean good coffee with a qualifier that actually means bad, but what can you do, I mean good coffee from candid to good. (If only there was a website reporting 15 years of coffee shops around the world, with hundreds of city guides and a searchable map feature, all for free.)
One “hack” as recently proposed Article in the Washington Post written by comedian Alex Falcone, is to go to the nearest “two-star coffee shop”. But does it actually work? We decided to investigate.
This suggestion is certainly correct. I’ve used a similar tactic when, say, trying to find good Asian food in an area that isn’t exactly a cultural hub as popularized in this post on X from user Freddie Wong (from which the concept of Falcone’s article seems, shall we say, slightly taken over). Wong assumes that destitute ratings of these places are usually due to unfamiliarity with the non-American version of the food. People walking into a Chinese restaurant and craving orange chicken probably don’t know what to do with really good mapo tofu.
Based on the article, it can be concluded that Falcone’s methodology is at least slightly different. He cites stores like Coava in Portland and Parlor in Brooklyn as the type of store he’s looking for. No matter what your preferred review site is – Yelp, Google, etc. –these are not two star stores. We checked: nowhere on the Internet do these stores actually have two stars. In fact, they all have damn near perfect ratings. The secret sauce, therefore, may not be in aggregate form, but in browsing through two-star reviews. The particular type of review we look for and which serves as an indication that the store is really good is the “barista was very rude but the coffee was good” type of review.
I seriously put this theory to the test. Sure, this is perhaps the most mind-numbing, lowest-common-denominator way to achieve this particular goal, reading Yelp reviewers (the worst people in the world) self-righteously prattle on about how they don’t get it, but I’ve done worse in searching for coffee. I wanted it to work. I checked out objectively good coffee shops, enormous and tiny, in Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, Up-to-date York, Philadelphia and honestly? These kinds of two-star reviews don’t really exist, at least not in enormous enough quantities to make them a useful heuristic. So I tried smaller cities where perhaps the entire population might not have caught up with the “third wave” trend at the same pace. I’ve tried coffee shops in Omaha, Wichita and Amarillo that I know are top notch and couldn’t find “bad service, good coffee” reviews.
I think the reason for this is that the average coffee consumer’s perception of a drink as good or bad is based more on their experience than on the drink itself. This isn’t really breaking news in the specialty coffee industry, which has struggled for years to legitimize its seriousness by being itself, only to then combat the perception of being too “snobbish.” If someone feels stupid in the store, they will not like this drink. I know I’ve experienced a situation where what should have been a cup of coffee right in my wheelhouse was tarnished by a too-cool-for-school barista, and clearly I should have known better.
So no, reading 2-star reviews is not a good and true way to find quality coffee. And I know I’m probably dissecting a frog here, but this was published in The Washington Post! Published not as a column or witty article, but as an candid tip in the travel section of one of the largest newspapers in the entire country! This type of coffee writing is what passes muster? Repackaging tired hipster barista tropes – but not for bad, for good! – and ripping off a viral tweet. Is that what we’re reading? Is this where mainstream coffee writing landed in 2024? Is this as far as we’ve come?
And that’s why once again I have to lament that if only there was a completely free coffee website, featuring coffee shop features in cities massive and tiny around the world for over a decade, with city guides and a digital map of coffee shops around the world, the whole process of finding good coffee wherever you are would be much easier. If only.
