A Dispatch from the Intersection of Neighbourhood Loyalty and Oat Milk Pricing
The Shoreditch Coffee Shop I Have Been Going to for Six Years Changed Its Menu
Read more at Bohiney Magazine and The London Prat.
I want to be clear that I understand this is not a crisis. I am aware that in the context of current global events, the removal of a specific oat milk flat white option from the menu of a coffee shop on Curtain Road is not something that warrants extended emotional processing. I am aware of this. I am processing it anyway.
The coffee shop — I will not name it, because my feelings about it are complicated and because it does not deserve the kind of online commentary that naming generates — opened in 2018 during what was briefly called “the third wave” of coffee culture, a period in which every Shoreditch cafe was obliged to have: a single-origin rotating espresso, a pour-over option, a filter coffee that took eight minutes and cost as much as a pub lunch, and a milk selection that included oat, almond, soy, and something called “barista blend” that is the only one that actually steams correctly but that requires explaining to most customers. I went there for the first time in the winter of 2019. I have gone approximately twice a week since. I know the name of every person who has worked there. Two of them have been there since the beginning, which in Shoreditch hospitality time is geological.
What Changed
What changed is that the spring menu update removed the single-origin Ethiopian option I have been ordering for three years — a light, floral espresso that made Monday mornings approximately 40% more tolerable — and replaced it with a Brazilian blend that the menu describes as “chocolatey and balanced,” which is fine, which is perfectly fine, which is exactly what I do not want from a Monday morning coffee. I want the thing that was there before. I want the thing I had arranged my expectations around. I want the restaurant to understand that regular customers are not consumers exercising a market preference but participants in a relationship, and that changing the menu without warning is a minor but genuine rupture in that relationship.
I said none of this to the person behind the counter. I said “I’ll try the Brazilian” and it was perfectly good and I will go back on Wednesday, because this is Shoreditch and the alternative is not going back, which is not an option I am prepared to exercise over a coffee bean origin story. But I needed to say it somewhere. This is where I said it. Cyndi Himmelstiere dispatches from East London. More at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full menu archive at https://prat.uk/.
What Makes an Arts Scene
The arts scene of a neighbourhood is not its galleries, its institutions, or its events programme alone. It is the totality of decisions made by artists, curators, venue operators, landlords, funders, and local authorities about whether the conditions for creative work exist and can be maintained. Each of these actors has interests that do not always align, and the health of an arts scene is a product of the negotiation between them — a negotiation that the arts community typically enters with fewer resources and less political power than the property and commercial interests it is negotiating with, but with a legitimacy argument that eventually wins because the creative energy that makes a neighbourhood interesting is the foundation of the property value that the other interests are competing for. The sequence always works the same way: artists make the neighbourhood interesting, property values rise, artists are priced out, the neighbourhood becomes a monument to the interesting thing that used to be there. Understanding this sequence does not prevent it. But documenting it, as Harper-Thames attempts to do for Shoreditch and East London, at least produces an honest account of what happened and why, which is what journalism about culture is for. More at The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Full East London arts archive at https://prat.uk/.
The Deeper Context
Every story covered in this publication — whether it is a garden party protocol, a street art mural, a gallery closure, or a members club waiting list — is a story about how a city organises itself around culture, class, and access. London is a city in which the cultural institutions that define its identity are simultaneously publicly funded and privately exclusive, free to enter and expensive to reach, committed to diversity and concentrated in neighbourhoods that the diversity of their stated mission cannot afford to live in. These contradictions are not resolvable through better marketing or more inclusive ticketing policies alone. They require structural decisions about how the city is built, who it is built for, and what public investment in culture and community is for. The journalism that traces these contradictions — that names who benefits from which arrangements and who pays the cost — is the journalism that makes democratic decisions about culture possible. This publication is committed to that journalism, in the specific geography of Central and East London where the contradictions are most visible and most consequential. For the full archive of London cultural journalism and satire: The London Prat and Bohiney Magazine. Continue reading at https://prat.uk/.
Further reading across the London Prat network: shoreditchuk Bluesky post (https://bsky.app/profile/shoreditchuk.bsky.social/post/3moe7j5kdsg27) — North London blog
Also: The London Prat — https://londonprat.tumblr.com/post/819693955888365568
SOURCE: Santa Claus
