We Greeks know coffee and I’m telling you, servo coffee is the best

I love coffee and that is why I am coming out. I have no shame anymore. On the way to work, and sometimes even on the way from work, I drive in to a petrol station and grab a cup.

A few years ago, on Lonsdale and Swanston streets – in the middle of Melbourne’s CBD – with a friend, we wanted coffee, it was only 10pm. It was impossible.

Fotis Kapetopoulos likes the simple pleasures, which for him includes a servo coffee.Credit: Jason South

We could drink as much booze as we wanted, or get a bowl of noodles, or a souvlaki – but no coffee. Even the ever-present and historic International Cakes had shut down its coffee machines.

So, we ended up at a convenience store. We put a small, waxed paper cup under the automatic espresso machine, pressed the desired buttons and bang, coffee, real coffee at throwaway change.

We looked at each other and one of us (not sure whom) said, “Hey, it’s OK!”

“It’s OK” became a regular joke. Now, every time I grab one of these I say “It’s OK, it’s OK” as a reassuring mantra.

As I get older, I become more aware of the importance of small joys and rituals. My small joy is lining up at the coffee machine at my regular service station in Preston along with tradies, Sudanese men and women, and realtors for my small $2 coffee.

A shot of espresso, then I fill ¾ of a cup with full cream milk. I’ve often thought about using another cup, so people won’t recognise that I’m drinking this coffee, but now I celebrate it.

Why am I coming out? Australians’ commitment to “good” coffee is strange. It seems everyone is an aficionado now.

As a young man in the 1980s, cappuccino was a luxury you could get when you went to an Italian coffee house. It was only non-Anglo migrants, Greeks, Italians, Lebanese and Turks, and a cluster of bohemians who drank non-freeze-dried coffee.

The mass was largely satisfied with instant coffee and the occasional cappuccino.

Greek pulverised coffee (not to offend any of our cousins), or Arabic Turkish, Balkan coffee, and instant, was the coffee I grew up with. It was not until 1986 when I lived in Vienna that I understood the diversity in coffee. A place whose intellectual energy from the 17th century onwards was born in coffee houses.

It was around the same time that I fell in love in Greece with that unique iced coffee of frappe – the Greeks are the only people on earth who made instant coffee taste good as a frothy iced drink.

Later in the mid-1990s in Singapore and Kuala Lumpur, I fell for the milky brew in a pint glass served at a local kopitiam.

Everyone is a latecomer to coffee if they’re not Ethiopian, where it all begins. Coffee empires from the Caliphates who introduced it to the Middle East, and Asia as they colonised and traded, the Ottomans who introduced it to the Balkans, then the French, Spaniards, and British – coffee-fuelled empires.

Things have changed. One of the reasons we drink real coffee, not chicory-flavoured 1950s Aussie imitations, is because of new markets like Brazil and Vietnam.

Now, only 250 metres from home, in my gentrified northern ’burb, if I decide to walk for a coffee at my local caf, I will have to spend an hour working through a weave of coffee mutations. Many of them which should be illegal like – pumpkin-dusted almond latte (wrong), of a decaf soy latte. Why drink coffee if you want decaffeination is something I never understood. Or for the uber hip, the ¾ latte or slow cold brew fusion. Seriously, coffee is not a socio-political statement.

Coffee, either as an espresso hit, a cafe latte in the morning – no one should ever drink a milk coffee after 11am – or a languid muddy Greek/Turkish brew had over long discussion is the best. Yet, that petrol station coffee for $2 in the car is one small joy, a liminal time-out-of-time.

Fotis Kapetopoulos is a journalist for the English edition of Neos Kosmos, a leading Greek-Australian masthead.

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