Sorry to this country
of its more baroque Viennese ancestors: When Tim Varney, co-founder of the Bureaux Collective roasting facility in Melbourne, was growing up in the ’80s, he recalls that they were frequently topped “with choc dusting and iceberg foam.
”Eater is bringing this guide to life with a food-filled trip to Melbourne, brought to you by Black Tomato. Check out the itinerary and book your trip.As specialty coffee culture bloomed throughout the ’90s and early aughts, a new generation of coffee professionals across the globe became tired of the “butchered” capps that Varney remembers drinking as a youth. They began honing their steam-wand skills, massaging air into the milk instead of jackhammering it; the resulting texture was no longer a dry, frothy peak that lay on top of the espresso like a cheap, scratchy comforter, but velvety and fully integrated throughout the drink — microfoam, which swept across specialty coffee like a tidal wave of perfectly textured milk., when the old, stacked cappuccino was upgraded, the label ultimately attached itself to the shiny new drink that replaced it in Australia’s progressive cafes. And if you’ve ventured into a coffee shop with a particular pretension of quality nearly anywhere in the developed world in the past 15 years or so and ordered a drink that consists of espresso and at least four ounces of milk, you have probably consumed what many Australians would now consider a “flattie,” whether you knew it or not. It might have been called a “flat white,” a “latte,” or possibly even a “cappuccino,” but they’re all referring to the same thing: an espresso drink with a reasonable volume of milk and a uniform microfoamed texture throughout.. But in a modern specialty coffee shop, the only difference between espresso drinks with milk, whether a “cortado” or “cappuccino,” is the amount of milk, not how it’s foamed or it’s integrated with the espresso. Prufrock Coffee in London oncefor precisely this reason; customers simply stated what size drink they wanted, in ounces. Still, some people remain attached to labels: Once, at a shop in London, “someone received a flat white, told the server they ordered a capp,” Varney recalls. “So to remedy, the barista came over with the choc shaker, popped it on top the flat white right there on the table and said, ‘There you go, it’s a cappuccino now.’” Ultimately, the move away from the hard-hat cappuccino and the emergence of the flat white makes sense in terms of shifting expectations: The rigid definition of the “classic” drink was limiting, and when it comes to true hospitality, service is about saying “yes” and offering the best of what there is — and when the drink in question is open to interpretation, as the flat white may well be, there’s a better chance that every interpretation is the “perfect” one. As St. Ali’s Ward remembers, “Actually, in cafes a lot of the flat white orderers — at least in my time on bar — were the ‘extra-hot, please’ types. So maybe the flat white is the compromise.” Leon Unglik brought a personal interpretation of Melbourne hospitality to New York City with his Midtown cafe Little Collins. “Australia has this very unique and special coffee culture,” he says, reminiscing about the all-day chill of the shops back home, “and the flat white kind of typifies that coffee culture and what we’re about. It’s not like a cocktail that you can look up a recipe and it’s almost universally the same everywhere.” His voice has the crack of a smile in it. “It’s been really funny being over here seeing this article written so many times, and all these different opinions. I remember reading once that someone claimed you had to pour holding the pitcher in a certain way.” Perhaps that’s another way of saying that the seemingly endless pursuit of the definitive flat white is missing the ocean for the microfoam, so to speak. The flat white is the first espresso drink to transcend its Italian roots to become something uniquely Antipodean, to defy the kinds of definitions we’re always trying to assign to things. It’s not a recipe you can follow, but the embodiment of an entire coffee culture, one that cares more about how things feel than how they’re supposed to be. The next time someone asks what a flat white is, you can tell them it’s just Australian for “je ne sais quoi.” has been a specialty-coffee professional and a working journalist for nearly 20 years. She works for the green-coffee importing company Cafe Imports, and has written for the
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