Caffé italiano

It wasn’t until the fifth or sixth day in Italy when I noticed something… Since leaving LAX we hadn’t encountered a single Starbucks. No stores, no hotels “proud to exclusively serve Starbucks,” nothing in the airports or train stations.

Apparently, no rioting anarchists are needed to keep back cultural imperialism. There’s no Starbucks in Italy because there’s no way they can compete against non-burned, non-watery coffee that’s served in a real cup (instead of cardboard) for €1.20. I knew that coffee in Italy was good, but I didn’t expect just how thoroughly good it is everywhere. The espresso at the airport (a traditional home of caffinated swill) is just as terrific as the espresso at a local cafe. Even the espresso on the Eurostar was pretty good – just make sure to get it from the dining car and not the mobile cart.

There had to be some news on Starbucks versus Italy, for Cthulhu’s sake it’s a whole country without one, and what I turned up was all good-luck–you’ll-need-it-har-har. Back in 1998, CEO Howard Schultz delusionally claimed that “When talking to people in the coffee business in Italy there is an underground feeling–they won’t say this publicly–that they want us to come. We spur growth.” Today, free free to raise a steaming cup of schadenfreude as Schultz has a Captain Obvious moment:

Starbucks has lost its soul and does not know where to find it.

Starbucks Chairman Howard Schultz lamented as much in a recent internal memo to his executives. He wrote that as the world’s largest specialty coffee company has expanded from fewer than 1,000 locations to about 13,000, its stores no longer even smell like coffee because of “flavor-locked packaging.”

His memo grieved, too, over the loss of “the romance and theatre” of traditional Italian espresso makers, which have been replaced by automatic machines. Schultz wrote that the new machines, while more efficient, block customers from watching as coffee drinks are made and sharing what he called an “intimate experience with the barista.”

“One of the results has been stores that no longer have the soul of the past,” he wrote. “Some people even call our stores sterile, cookie cutter, no longer reflecting the passion our partners feel about our coffee.”

The leak of Schultz’s lost-our-soul memo has generated buzz on business pages. But it has occasioned only a shrug from the caffeine cognoscenti in Seattle, which has more coffee shops per capita than any other major U.S. city.

For most Seattleites, what Schultz called “the watering down of the Starbucks experience” is stale news – akin to reports that the Seattle SuperSonics are a losing NBA team or that Seattle winters are wet.

“Like, duh, I have felt that way about Starbucks for 10 years,” said Sean Seery, 36, an acupuncturist who sat one recent morning outside Victrola, a popular independent coffee shop on Seattle’s Capitol Hill.

Meanwhile, can someone recommend a place in Glendale that can make a cappuccino like that one I had in Venice pictured above? Simulacrums will not be tolerated.