Cafe culture in Victoria, B.C.

M Richardson,

Though I agree with your ideas that snobbishness has no place in a cafe, I must disagree with your other opinions.

What is wrong with a cup of french press? It is prepared for each customer, guaranteeing you a fresh cup of properly prepared coffee, instead of your cup of \"regular\" drip coffee. The idea of being adverse to a bleached filter is quite common, especially for the West Coast.

Also, I might point you in the direction of a paper published in Scientific American that has a beautiful graph displaying the chemistry behind why a longer (in time) shot is inappropriate. www.illyusa.com/pr/coffee.pdf is a paper prepared by Dr. Ernesto Illy and has very sound quantitative data that demonstrates why 30 seconds is optimal.

To remain on topic though, I have just visited Discovery, Habit and 2% Jazz all in a period of 24 hours. 2% has always been one of my favorite cafes in North America, and will remain so based on the consistency and uniqueness of Sam's product and service. Discovery was awesome. It reminded me of Fantastico without the grunginess and my cup of Yemen off of the Clover competed with most coffees I've had from world class roasters. Habit was recommended to me by Sam Jones and I was thoroughly impressed. This place has skyrocketed into my top 5 cafes in North America for it's style and coffee. Very, very impressive.

I might add, if you can't handle the attitude, maybe let the coffee speak for itself and don't try to mess with what's presented on the menu.

Hello,

I completely agree about Fantastico. I lived in Seattle for 7 years, and if you want attitude, it is the place to go. But I never saw anything like Fantastico. I wanted a double Macchiato, but I was on a stroll with my girlfriend and had the audacity to ask for it to go. They would not serve me. They insisted that the drink had to go in a ceramic cup.

Now I understand, the drink is *better* in a ceramic cup, and they can do latte art etc, but seriously. A paying customer is a paying customer and its not like I was asking them to put Smarties on top or something. I just wanted to get a reasonable facimile of my drink and be able to leave their store with it.

Discovery Coffee has always been very friendly, and the one time I went to Habit they were fine. I also like Dolce Vita quite a lot, and had a nice coffee at the Union Cafe yesterday.

A few $9/hr wage slaves at Cafe Fantastico seem to think their mere association with good coffee justifies being rude and sarcastic. WRONG! The coffee IS good but their \"service\" is CRAP by any reasonable standard. As a direct result, I now gladly pay more and/or make special trips elsewhere just to avoid them.

Hi guys!

I'm coming on as a guest because I want to say a couple things about CF too.
I worked there for six years and in that time I've seen a lot of people come and go, a lot of good regulars who are great people (hi Colin!) and really enjoyed making coffee. It's true we're OTT about our serving sometimes and it's too bad that so many people have been offended.

A few things I would like to say about the Rules (which cause endless consternation and uproar) and on rudeness:

The folks who tell people they can't have their espresso to go are not the ones who make the rules. We at the front of house can't change the house rules even if we want to, Ryan and Kristy have set them. We get yelled at a lot over them. Yelling will not make the rules change. Apocalypse probably won't make the rules change. There's nothing we can do about it.

There are lots of places in town that do drinks that we don't do (a long espresso, for example, or espresso to go) and we encourage people who really want those drinks to go to other places. There are a lot of reasons we don't do those drinks and the person at the till will be able to tell you. When someone wants something we don't serve, we're not trying to be rude when we say \"You could try Starbucks or X other coffee shop\", we're trying to help.

As for attitude, I can only speak for myself. I have been rude to customers, yes, though I have never freaked out on anyone. I do get tired. I have bad days. I work very hard. And I don't take a half tab of E before work, so I'm not artificially, stupidly, inanely happy and chipper. What you see is what you get. I know I'm flawed, I try to keep it under wraps because I like people, but service is hard and sometimes I'm not strong enough for my job.

Personally, asking someone to leave because they're yelling at me or telling someone the boss won't let me split that shot doesn't makes me a Nazi (speaking of tact and rudeness, this is a term I strenuously object to; we're not harming anyone).

In order to foster an air of professionalism before coffee got so professionalized in Victoria, Ryan and Kristy told us that we do not have to suffer any kind of threatening behavior or abuse. For myself (when I started) and many of my younger coworkers, this is the first job where it's been OK to stand up and say \"I think you'd better leave\" if someone is yelling at you. Yes, sometimes that policy is abused, but it's still a wonderful policy and I hope they never change it.

Lastly, I'm no wage slave and neither are my coworkers. If you want to know what we make, check out the \"Now Hiring\" sheet hanging in the cafe. It details our wages and benefits.

Phew, now, having said all that, I'm leaving Fantastico for greener pastures (had my last day yesterday).

I'm leaving for many reasons, but one of them is that I want to have more time to talk with the customers and engage with them. I can no longer do this at Caffe Fantastico, because it's so busy. I'm going to Discovery, and I hope, after reading these posts, I'm not a liability to them.