Toronto 1 – Blackberry, coffee and tea

If USA is the Marlborough country, then Toronto is the Blackberry country. I have met many people who are not in the corporate industries and don’t use their Blackberries for emailing, yet still have those bulky devices. It is a culture, much like Apple’s IPod. May be even a status symbol. Those who use it for emailing inevitably become infomaniacs, addicted to reading and replying emails on-the-go.

Toronto is divided in three coffee camps: proud Tim Horton-ians, sheepishly defiant or snobbishly holding their heads up Starbucks-ians, and the other smaller and independent operators headed by Second Cup-inas. The camps are as passionate about their allegiances as Canadians can be, but only Tim Horton-ians consider themselves truly Canadian. On a tour of Toronto a few months after my arrival one of the tour guides proudly announced that there is only one other country outside North America that has a Tim Horton store: Afghanistan. In Afghanistan Canadian troops have Tim Horton to create a home away from home. Coca-Cola employed this marketing tool in Vietnam I believe. I wonder what other cultural icons could be taken by soldiers to far away lands. What would New Zealanders, Australians, Russians, British take to make them feel at home?

One thing that unites these Toronto coffee camps is the two styles of drinking coffee: on the go or sitting down. On a visual snapshot of Toronto you could recognise a morning if every second person is carrying a large cup of coffee. This is the reflection of a more global on-the-go lifestyle, the fast-drink sibling of the fast-food culture of North America and the cousin of on-the-go-emails Blackberry infomaniacs. The other lifestyle statement is sitting down with a long drink to study, to work or as a business meeting, classically with a laptop or with notes and books for the poorer university students. I doubt it is more productive to work or study with the music and noise on the background, but it is certainly stylish. Whichever lifestyle you elect to follow, the cups are the same size: large, very large, or jumbo, also variably called standard, medium and “grande”.

The coffee places are at competition with each other of course, often located next to each other. The result is a huge selection of available combinations of the drinks which require either an intimate knowledge of the menu or a prolonged discussion at the counter for the uninitiated. Only a Canadian knows what “double double” means (double sugar double cream at Tim Horton). Star Bucks not to be outdone on fancy names for drinks has come up with a “Dopio Espresso” (double espresso). If you ask for a double espresso, the salesperson will inevitably repeat “You mean Dopio Espresso?” even though you asked the same thing of the same salesperson for the third time within a week.

To their credit, only Starbucks sell espresso, which is of OK quality medium roast made by an automated espresso machine. But you have to ask “to have it here” if you don’t want it in a paper cup. Second Cup also offer a drink labelled “espresso”, but I have not found much resemblance to one when ordered it at a few different places.

All coffee chains boast their socially responsible corporate affiliations with a charity and their ecologically friendly orientation – again good marketing at work that creates a feel good factor about buying their product even for the sceptics like myself.

A popular drink is steeped tea, the existence of which I was not aware of until Toronto. It is a long brewed black tea, meaning the tea bags a let sit in a pot of boiled water until there is equilibrium between the physical contents of the tea bag and the water in the pot as reflected by the equilibrium of their colours. The tea bags used probably had no fine tea qualities to start with judging by the way they are stored at the counter, but even if there were any they are drowned by the heavy taste and tannins.

Both coffee and tea are drunk for the caffeine contents. Decaf is available but to most people drinking it would defy the meaning of the morning coffee, and is mainly drunk by those wishing to socialise but refusing the caffeine, sort of like alcohol free beer. Gustatory qualities of the drinks are occasionally debated by different camps, but the discussion typically revolves around the differences of how fresh is the percolated coffee and its price. The connoisseurship does not extend beyond flavoured drinks.

Both good coffee and tea are available, but one has to search for these boutique places, which adds to the experience of exclusivity when you find one.