Coffee Anyone?

How the humble Flat White ate the world.

This week, I've decided to pivot away from American politics because, frankly, watching that circus is starting to feel like a full-time, unpaid internship in despair. Instead, I'm returning to my other, gentler vice: travel writing, specifically about the thing quietly ruining it everywhere, the ubiquitous flat white coffee.

Australians will tell you, unprompted and at great length, that they invented it. Whether it was invented in Sydney, by a specific barista, or by Australia as a collective act of will depends on who's telling you — but it was definitely Australian. Whether that's true or not, the flat white has since colonised the planet with a thoroughness the British Empire could only dream of, dispensed by the same identikit bearded baristas from Vanuatu to Vancouver.

It's as though a single prototype was cloned in a barista lab somewhere in Melbourne or Sydney and shipped out fully assembled, to the rest of the planet, tattoos included.

Welcome to the gentrification of froth.

Starbucks, to be fair, got there first, turning coffee into a beige, trademarked, thirty-seven-syllable ordering ritual decades before anyone had heard the word "artisanal." But the flat white crowd looked at that and thought: we can do this with far more panache.

At some point, every third café owner on earth had the same epiphany: we should make this place look "cool." They gutted and remodelled their premises, usually opting for the exposed-brick look, complete with a wall of Soviet-style propaganda posters that nobody in the room noticed.

The ceilings now groan under the weight of whatever obsolete object was lying around at the time: an inverted umbrella, a surfboard, a bicycle, or a piece of discarded farm equipment, all dangling a few inches above your skull like a health-and-safety violation, only with designer lighting.

Jeremy Clarkson, never a man to do anything by halves, hung an entire chromed tractor from the ceiling of his Cotswolds pub. One can only assume the insurance premium is now included in the diners' bills.

Does the décor matter? Apparently, enormously, because now you can enjoy a flat white under a tractor, a canoe, or an upturned umbrella. And if you are honest, the coffee in general tastes pretty much the same, which is to say, fine, in the way a beige hotel room in any city is.

Social media has a lot to answer for, as Instagram and TikTok have turned "discovering" cool neighbourhoods across the globe, each with equally photogenic coffee emporiums attached, into a competitive sport with no prize and no requirement for originality. Now every city is dominated by the same six cafés, each with a different postcode.

I give you Exhibit A, sitting right on my doorstep in Bali.

Canggu, once a rice-paddy village that discovered Wi-Fi about fifteen years ago, has since been fully colonised by digital nomads perched in cafes with laptops, sipping oat milk and eating vegan something or other, accompanied by hordes of Australians escaping their day-to-day lives by quaffing the very flat whites they claim to have invented.

What used to be a farmer's field is now a nine-dollar smoothie bowl, with a "no shoes, no worries" sign outside. The rice paddies are still visible behind it, but have been reduced to mere set dressing.

The coffee's lukewarm, the croissant's a day old, but the lighting is more than agreeable, making the whole transaction taste less like a meal and more like proof of attendance.

What's been quietly lost in all this is the local warung, where the food is genuinely good and surprisingly cheap, and, on occasion, will try to kill you. It's the kind of mild food poisoning that becomes a story you tell for years, rather than a photo of your breakfast you show your mates back home that nobody remembers taking.

If you are in any way intrepid, go looking for something genuinely local these days. You'll have to work for it, because the money has moved in, the chains have bought the boutiques, and Canggu now looks suspiciously like Bali's answer to Shanghai, which looks suspiciously like Stockholm, which looks suspiciously like Seattle.

Global homogeneity, minus the dysentery. Progress, I suppose.

The modern-day traveller seems perfectly happy with this comfortable, unthreatening arrangement, ordering a flat white that tastes exactly like the one back home, in a café that looks exactly like the one back home, with ambience exactly the same as the one back home.

You've "travelled" without ever really leaving home. My advice, for what it's worth, is to wander off, get properly lost, and find the place with no Wi-Fi password pinned to the wall and something dangerous dangling from the ceiling.

The coffee might not be Instagrammable. It might just be good, and if not, have a cup of tea