Better latte than never for a flat white drinker in North America

One Australian traveller’s search for a good flat white in North America was punctuated by several false starts.

A ‘perfectly presentable’ flat white.

North America came rather late to coffee, at least coffee as we know it. But I came late to North America and, while travel is meant to throw surprises at you, I imagined that on the coffee front we’d be in harmony. Alas, there were several false starts.

The first came on the first day of our first visit to Canada. A Vancouver contact, Wendy, was a Perth native, so over dinner we talked of Australia as much anything. Call it muscle memory, because when the waitress sought coffee orders, I blurted out: “Two flat whites, please.” An odd silence followed until it was broken by Wendy’s translation: “Two lattes, hold the froth.”

Mis-step number two was in Montreal where, somehow, we slept through breakfast. But after compensating via a browsing brunch in the Jean Talon food market, a Turkish cafe drew us in.

With the menu listing several recognisable variations on the cappuccino-latte theme, I let loose with my school-learned French. “Deux cafes latte, s’il vous plait.” And out came, in tall, Middle Eastern-style glass cups, two peppermint teas.

My wife and I workshopped this. My request for “latte” possibly was expressed with too much verve, being processed as “la the”. Hence the tea. In my defence, the server got the “deux’’ right, but I promised to be less franca with the lingua from now.

The third strike was not long in coming. That evening, hungry after a day on foot around Montreal’s diverse neighbourhoods, we tried a traveller’s hack that rarely fails us: accost someone in the street and ask for a good local place.

Thus we ended up in a beautiful French bistro brimming with classics: crab bisque, tournedos bearnaise and iles flottante. The Bordeaux was mellifluous, and by meal’s end my guard was down again. I asked for cafe latte.

“We do a very special latte here,” promised our waiter. He got that right. It was layers of coffee, milk and froth dusted with cinnamon, in a sort of parfait glass. “It looks like a lava lamp,” said my wife. “It looks like black coffee from now on,” thought I.

But although it was getting obvious that on this continent we and coffee were in parallel universes, my hopes rose any time I spied an espresso machine, only to be dashed. In a high-end burger bar in Boston I was even told that for something as fancy as a latte, I needed “a specialist coffee place, like Starbucks”.

And then along came Roland.

We found him in a risotto place in Bleecker Street, New York, and he was the sort of waiter that likes, no, needs to engage with you. “Where you guys from?”

“Australia,” we said.

“Yeah, where?”

“A place called Melbourne.”

“I love Melbourne,” he said. “There’s a great Italian restaurant in Balwyn.”

Now, how a Greenwich Village rapper — Roland had been out a few times for the Brunswick Street Festival — ended up in Melbourne’s most stolidly middle-class suburb, whose only claim to musical fame was as the butt of the joke in the Skyhooks song Balwyn Calling, was something perhaps worth pursuing. But I had other plans for this man.

The restaurant had an espresso machine that Roland had manipulated a few times, so I made one final roll of the dice.

I beckoned him over and said: “Roland, you’ve been to Australia, right?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he replied.

“And you know how Australians like their coffee, right?”

“Yes, indeed,” he said.

“So Roland,” I asked, trying not to sound pleading, “do you think you could make us two flat whites?”

You could sense the cogs turning inside his head, calculating the risk-reward around the size of his tip if he could pull this one off. “Of course,” he finally said.

And in due course, Roland delivered two perfectly presentable flat whites. Which is all I ever wanted. The parallel lines had finally met.