Good coffee should be savoured at places dedicated to making coffee
From a lot of road food testing, I’ve come up with a rough rule of thumb: Don’t order coffee at a breakfast place, and don’t order food at a coffee joint. In other words, stick with what each does best.
First off, I’m not saying absolutely don’t order coffee with breakfast. For a lot of people, it’s the only jolt of java they’re going to get before hitting the road. And there is something comforting about coffee hitting the bottom of that mug just as your seat’s hitting the chair at 7 am. I’m just saying, don’t expect that coffee to be great.
Think about it. Most breakfast places charge $2 or thereabouts for a cup of coffee and maybe two refills. I’m sure they’re not making much money off these bottomless cups. It’s just something they’re expected to offer—more of a loss leader, in marketing terms. Whether it’s driven by economics or not, the resulting coffee may be fresh (busy breakfast restaurants do go through lots of pots) but it’s also usually weak and indifferent, at least by my standards. The spoons that arrive inside the filled coffee cup at some diners are not exactly standing up.
This place served up a mean omelette. The coffee? Not so much
And if restaurants do offer espresso-based drinks, it’s normally the wait staff handling those duties, on top of running around serving breakfast. I strongly doubt they’re timing those shots.
A lot of love, and skill, go into making a good pour-over coffee at 49th Parallel in Vancouver, B.C.
What good breakfast joints do well is make good breakfasts, because they often have two experienced cooks focused on just cooking those breakfasts. At most coffee joints, good as they may be at making coffee, they have exactly zero cooks producing made-to-order breakfasts. Instead, they offer breakfast treats, like scones or muffins, typically produced offsite and delivered close to opening hour by a local baker, which in some cases means it might be reasonable fare.
This delightful breakfast wrap—at Old Town Coffee in Lander, Wyoming—is an unusual example of a coffee place serving up good food. The reason? They made it fresh to order.
Unwilling to call it quits here, though, most coffee shops also offer something hot—maybe a breakfast egg sandwich or burrito. But in the vast majority of cases, these breakfasts have already been made and are then heated in an oven or microwave when ordered. (I recently watched one café worker put together breakfast sandwiches assembly-line style, slapping white slabs of cooked, cold egg between slices of bread to await the panini press.) In other words, it’s hardly fresh fare, though it is more efficient… for the cafe. I’ve even been offered the “opportunity” to heat the food myself in a microwave. Eggs or croissants nuked in a microwave. Yum!
And if you see something wrapped in plastic, run for the hills. To me, this screams “day old”. I’m always amazed people will pay $3 or more for this packaged stuff.
Do plastic-wrapped treats say “fresh” to you?
So, I tend to keep my two morning road-trip worlds, breakfast and coffee, apart—eating breakfast first and then getting a coffee at a coffee joint. And if you’ve got the time, I suggest you do the same.
Your thoughts? Just hit the “reply” button at the top left of this post.
Marathon Mouth 
I agree. The worst mistake that I make walking into a coffee shop is: walking in there when I’m hungry.
Inevitably, I order some kind of speciality coffee( a mocha is usually my poison, I know, don’t hold it against me) and also something that has been pre-packaged and most likely left where it stands for a few days waiting for me to shell out my five dollars to consume this dry, tasteless and usually stomachache inducing morsel. (I’m speaking specifically about a “tuna” sandwich that recently made its way into my life)
Blind hunger is usually the culprit that is responsible for me parting with most of my money in coffee shops.
I say, bite the bullet, wait on the coffee shop until you have had something meaningful put in your stomach or be prepared to part with at least double the amount of money you wanted to spend if you are the type that needs the shot in the arm (coffee) before anything else.
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Excellent post, Bill – I couldn’t agree more. Another example of this way to live is the European night out – a normal evening in any part of western Europe begins with tapas at one joint, from which you move on to another to savour an entree, from which you casually stroll (to build further appetite) to a third stop for a ganache or gelato, followed by one last stop for a late-night demi-caffe. Although that may not work well in our North American culture, at the very least we can apply it to our mornings on the road when time is long and we have the time to savour good food and good coffee. Really – what’s the rush?
P.s. An americano savoured while people watching – I have grown to love it.
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