What's For Breakfast?
What's For Breakfast?
Back-to-school (for some of you) means we lean heavily into coffee recipes this month
Welcome to "coffee month." The recipes in September will all contain coffee because caffeine. And because, in the northern hemisphere at least, it's back-to-school. Not only does that (often) mean the mornings start earlier; it (often) means protracted battles over breakfast. It means (soon! already! gah!) the days start getting shorter; it's darker earlier and damn if the first cup of coffee doesn't just hit different under such circumstances.
There's an art, no doubt, to making a good cup of coffee. But there's an art too, I reckon, to parsing an online review to find out where to buy a good cup of coffee.
You have to realize, from the get-go, that very few people are motivated to leave reviews; and more than likely, those who do have either had a very good or very bad experience. Unless someone says otherwise, it's probably safe to assume that they've only been to the place of business once; regulars make it a point to signal "I eat here all the time" or "I've been coming here for a decade." These sorts of rhetorical moves are meant to boost the trustworthiness of a review; after all, it's possible that someone had a shitty meal because it was just an off-day for the server or the kitchen was short-staffed or — and I think this is often the case — because the person writing the review was actually the asshole.
It can be tricky to decide who to believe when reading reviews, particularly when they typically vary so widely. When Frank from Concord, MA says a breakfast joint has "the best eggs and bacon I've ever eaten," you don't really know what Frank's eggs and bacon experiences have been like. Perhaps it's only the second time he's opted for eggs-over-easy after a lifetime of incorrectly believing that scrambled was preferable. Perhaps he's ordered the exact same thing at every diner he's ever stopped at for the past thirty years of breakfast dining, and when Frank says it's "the best," it really is going to blow your friggin' mind.
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