Lost in caffeine translation (part two)

The advantage of being a sixth year architecture student is that you can be shamelessly grumpy. I’ve been around this place for so long that people generally don’t argue with me when I say “it weren’t like that in my day”. I’ve been riding the Arts Tower paternoster for so long that I now believe the urban myth that it used to run noticeably faster than it does now. And I’ve been drinking coffee from the basement café for so long that I know it’s getting more expensive.

Throughout my undergraduate days (between 2001 and 2004) I, like many other architecture students and staff, would break the long studio days by descending the lower ground floor of the Arts Tower to the rather shabby but well patronised café. Freshly prepared 10 inch baguettes were made by the staff and sold for less than £2. Soft, doughy cookies were pulled from the oven throughout the day, and could be bought with a coffee for less than £2. The coffee was nothing special (the beans were ground and prepared in an automatic machine) but there were plentiful supplies of different teas, and nothing was fancy or expensive.

But those days are gone. Long gone. Gone are the soft cookies. Gone are the big and simple baguettes (gone, in fact, is the entire kitchen: everything is bought in). They have fancy ingredients and organic labels, and taste pretty normal. Gone too are the cheap and cheerful coffees and teas. In their place are fancy coffees with fancy names from a fancy machine.

No, seriously, I’m not kidding. A 12oz coffee in a University of Sheffield outlet costs £1.55. Add twenty pence if you don’t have a student card, or if you happen to be a long suffering employee of the university. One of the few perks about being an academic - eating and drinking at student rates - has been snatched away.

Since I’ve been working in the centre of Sheffield over the last few weeks, I couldn’t help wondering how that compared to the coffee I could buy elsewhere in Sheffield. Surely a university coffee bar wouldn’t be more expensive than a proper coffee bar? To find out, took a walk into town, trying to compare the cost of an 12oz university Americano with what the competition has to offer.

Above: Coffee Revolution at the Student Union. £1.60 for a 12oz coffee, and it’s Fairtrade.

Above: PJ Taste on West Street. It’s a privately run sandwich bar that sources almost all of its ingredients locally. Obviously coffee doesn’t grow in Yorkshire, but one of the partners in the firm assured me that they serve only the best coffee they can source. £1.70 for a 12oz cup.

Above: Cafe Utopia in West One. £1.70 for an 12oz americano.

Above: Café Moco on West Street, where it’s £1.75 for an 12oz Americano (trust me, the price is obscured by the light reflecting).

The Starbucks employee at the Division Street branch I spoke to informed me that company policy forbade anyone photographing the interior or exterior of their coffee shop. I don’t have a problem with that, because the interior of that god awful corporate dump isn’t particularly photogenic. A regular (12oz) Americano costs £1.75.

Above: £1.85 for a 12oz Americano in Caffétteria. The manager assured me that if he wanted to sell bad coffee for half that price, he could, but preferred to sell decent Italian coffee.

So (and admittedly to my disappointment) I found that the university outlet is still cheaper than Sheffield’s trendy coffee joints. But only just. Anyone who assumes the university outlets are substantially better value than commercial cafés and bars needs to know that the university intends to make every penny it can out of these secondary activities. But having sampled a couple of these coffees (and having been given a very generous invitation to come back to PJ Taste to sample their blend on the house when I wasn’t so caffeinated) it’s going to be hard to swallow the university’s upmarket prices when the product is so average.

Just when I thought I had got to the point of realising that my grumpiness had been misdirected, I hit the jackpot. Above, the best value and best tasting coffee I’ve found in Sheffield. Gusto Italiano’s Americano is £1.40 for a large (12oz) cup. What’s more, it’s a gorgeous nutty Italian blend that’s rich without being burnt. They’re on Church Street, on the tram line just west of the Cathedral stop. Go there for the reasonably priced coffee, and go back because it tastes so good.

Snapshot: shoe shop

Seen in TKMaxx, Sheffield. And there was I thinking it was all down to manners…

Lost in caffeine translation (part one)

A few hours after getting back from America, the jet lag still playing havoc with my body clock, I picked up a hire car and drove south to Oxford. There was stuff in Sheffield that needed to go to Oxford, stuff in Oxford that needed to go to Norfolk, and stuff in Norfolk that needed to go to Sheffield. A five hundred mile tour of England was needed, and the simplest option was to do it in a car. The god of upgrades looked down on me as I waited at the rental office, and soon I was on the road in a little Nissan Note with automatic transmission. I spent the first hour’s drive down the busy M1 motorway trying to find inventive things for my redundant left leg to do in the absence of a clutch.

I stopped at the service plaza near East Midlands Airport at around 21h on that rainy Friday night. With sporadic sleeping I was lost in an unending day that had started in Chicago at some indeterminate point in the past. The main body of the service station was a bizarre recreation of an internal courtyard, with overpriced motel rooms looking down on an enclosed food court, complete with plastic planting and pointless sun shades. A forgetable steel and glass roof (picked at random from the drawer marked ‘curvy roofs that are cheap to build’) was slapped on top. It was not, as the architect might have hoped, anything like a Mediteranean piazza.

As my body adapted to the change in time zone, my brain adapted to the change in currency. Surprised by the monstrous self service coffee bar, where stainless steel attachments to the coffee machines attempted to convey the impression of a fancy espresso bar, I took this photograph of the menu. Something didn’t seem quite right.

It was only about fifteen minutes later, sipping black ‘Americano’ as I joined the A42, that it clicked.

£2.25 (US$4.50) for a coffee. £2.60 ($5.20) if you want froth.

I’d complain about the high cost of wages, but the only person employed in that corner of the faux piaza was a spotty teenager whose sold job requirement was to be able to take money in exchange for coffee from automated vending machines without laughing out loud.

The coffee was, of course, horrible.

(Don’t want to be) on the road behind you

The last day of my little jaunt around Minnesota and Wisconsin was spent covering the mad dash from Lake Namekagon in northern Wisconsin back to Chicago. After a particularly good diner breakfast in Glidden, Wisconsin (and other waitress who, on hearing my accent, stopped dead in her tracks, smiled and said “where in  the world are you from?”) the roads gave way to highways and freeways, and the miles sped past.

On the final approach the Chicago, the Illinois traffic crowded around Tony and the empty roads I’d been pounding over for the last five days turned into distant memories. My last experience of driving on busy American freeways was on the crowded I-95 between New York City and Washington DC.

Not wanting to make any sweeping generalisations about people, but Americans know (to use an Americanism) jack-sh*t about driving on motorways. The principle on British dualled roads is that you stay left (nearside) unless you’re passing. In America, any lane will do, and because most cars have automatic transmissions with cruise controls, any fixed speed will do. That just leaves room for the drivers who think a stopping distance is the length of time it takes for a cop to pull you over.

Name and shame time. Not that we’ll say anything about me taking pictures behind the wheel of a moving car, but I had to get these pics when I saw the driver of this grey Nissan Altima tailgating every vehicle on the road. Here’s a particular scary lane change.

Followed by an aggressive and uttlerly pointless bumper to bumper persuit of the van in front. Another good rule to remember is “tyres and tarmac”: when stopped in traffic, always allow enough room between you and the car in front to see that vehicle’s tyres and a bit of tarmac, so that if you’re shunted from behind you’re less likely to hit the car in front. This driver doesn’t even follow that rule at 110km/h.

It was only when I got these pictures onto my computer that I noticed the driver’s somewhat appropriate license plate.

Zooming over Sheffield

Should be working on my dissertation, which goes off for binding later this week. So just time to have some more fun with the optical zoom on my new digital camera. Here’s a view of Crookesmoor, Crookes and a bit of Walkley from the Arts Tower on this gorgeous autumn afternoon.

And here’s my house. It’s in the top left quadrant of the photograph above. Well, I say ‘my house’. It’s one of the ones in the photo below. I’m not saying which one a) to make life harder for cyber-stalkers and b) because I’d like you to think that I live in the nice detached house with a greenhouse and a big garden on the right. Which, of course, it might be.

I remain most impressed. Perhaps site visits won’t be necessary this semester if I can find a clean window somewhere in the department.