The following passage is an excerpt from a new essay that will be published in the Life's a Batch book, which is coming out May 17 2020. Watch this space.

The problem today is that there are too many cafes. Supply and demand are out of whack, creating an unbalanced power dynamic between servers and customers. If a customer feels dissatisfied at one venue, he can reprimand the barista and, if he doesn’t feel dully recompensed, he can walk down the street where there is another cafe. And if he doesn’t think the offerings or service is up to snub there, he can find another. There was a lady who came into the cafe I worked at and, upon asking her what coffee she wanted, said, “Not sure. Maybe a flat white. A cafe down the road usually has this really nice decaf. And they put a shot…. Actually no. Two shots of coffee in a tall glass, I think. Topped up with milk but not all the way. And they make the milk extra creamy somehow and put a dash of some spice in, I believe. Can you do that?”

“Maybe,” I said. “What spice?”

“Not sure.”

“Mmm. Okay. Topped up how much then? Three quarters?”

“Not sure,” she said.

“Probably best you just go to your normal cafe then.”

The extra competition has caused the standard of everything to go up, of course, but so too has customer’s expectations.

The online world hasn’t helped, either. Reviewing platforms have given voice to the most finicky and scathing. At a market, I was talking to an owner of a suburban cafe and, after bringing up the subject of reviews, she said, “A customer left a review the other day saying, ‘Staff are friendly, coffee and food are great, plenty of vegetarian options. Couldn’t have had a nicer experience. The only reason I’m giving Four Stars is that, you know, there’s always room for improvement.”

Later that night, I searched on Google for terrible reviews. There were 284,000,000 results. So I clicked on one of the top links, scrolled down, and found the following glowing review of a reasonably well-known restaurant. “Its rottenness is both inherent and cosmetic; it is culinarily insipid and morally insidious.”

Morally insidious? Really? Talk about being dramatic. People who take pleasure out of seeing others pain are morally insidious. A meal is disappointing, at best.

Also, the reviewer didn’t even specify what part of the venue was morally insidious. Did he really think the carpaccio had dubious ethics? Probably not. More likely, he was referring to the people behind the venue, in which case he’s stepped over the line.

With reviews, or any constructive criticism for that matter, there is that unspoken rule where you have to focus on the product or service. You can’t attack a person’s character, too. You can’t say, “Maybe next time, you can make the coffee just a bit hotter and, also, if you can, stop being such a lowly piece of shit.” You probably could if you knew the barista ran a Nazi camp. But, usually, the food critique never even meets the chef or owner.

I’m guessing the critic was drawing some wild parallels, believing that if the fillet mignon was a flop then the chef must’ve been too. Such inferences are alarming, of course. That would be like saying to a student who handed in a term paper, “Jimmy, you seem nice in class but, after seeing your inability to solve differential equations, I prove mistaken. You’re the next Stalin.”

With reviews like that littered over the internet, I’m not surprised cafe owners feel on the back foot. Cafe culture is like Uber if only the passenger got to rate the driver but not the other way around. This wasn’t always the case, though.

When I was two, my parents sold their house in the city, quit their jobs, packed up a yellow Land Cruiser, and ventured south to Denmark where they decided to buy a four by two in the forest, as well as a bricked corner store on the town’s high-street. They turned half of the store into a newsagency and the other half into a cafe, naturally.

Now, as an adult, I understand the appeal of moving to the idyllic countryside and owning grass-roots business that would be the centre of the community. But what I also know is that the secret to a successful cafe is a team of passionate operators. Seeing as my parents had never worked a day in hospitality before, the venture sounded more like a start to an anticlimactic joke: what happens when an Occupational Therapist and a former Christian Monk open a cafe?

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