Do you really think people drink lattes just to be pretentious? Has it occurred to you that they like them?
Look, fact is, coffee is one of those things that can be good, bad, horrible or great depending on all sorts of factors…the beans, roasting, method of preparation, cleanliness, temperature, and yes, the skill of the preparator. The attitude that it’s all an indistinguishable muddle and that all coffee is just coffee is pretty odd. Sure, making coffee drinks isn’t brain surgery, it’s not even carpentry or plumbing. Anyone free of mental defect can learn to pull esspresso. But still, you can do it well, or poorly, you can serve your customers with style and leave them smiling, or you can leave them scowling, and so on.
But why the hate for “barista”? As has been pointed out, it just means “bartender”. You don’t get upset and think the bartender is giving himself airs with his fancy title, do you? Fact is, lots of coffee words are being imported from Italian and French because they’ve been paying attention to coffee for a long time. We’ve suddenly woken up to the idea that paying attention to coffee is worthwhile only a decade ago. Sure, we could come up with English words instead importing French or Italian words, and if Americans had developed coffee culture on our own we’d wouldn’t be using Italian or faux-Italian coffee terms, they’d be using Americanisms and complaining about how pretentious it all is.
You want to change things, go back in time 100 years and start educating Americans about coffee so we can grow up using indigenous terms instead of importing European terms. The only reason imported European terms sound “pretentious” to American ears is that up until the 20th Century America was a cultural backwater. High culture and fancy food came from Europe, as opposed to good old-fashioned American raw squirrel meat and whiskey. Of course, nowadays things go the other way just as often, except no one thinks it’s pretentious for people in Japan or France to use English loan words for computer technology.
Fact is, Italians figured out superior methods of preparing coffee than the good-old-fashioned American church basement percolator, which sucks. And now Americans have figured this out, and we’re borrowing their methods wholesale along with their terminology. Whining about the associated terminology is silly, like the French academy that banned “le weekend”. Those sissy Frenchies! You don’t wanna be like a sissy-boy Frenchy, all worried about his precious parlay-vous France-ay, do ya? Real Americans are secure enough in the unquestioned superiority of American culture so it doesn’t bother us to borrow foreign words on the rare occasion foreigners have a good idea. We can be gracious about it, we’re big hearted like that.
FWIW, I read this as “perpetrator” at first. I thought it was rather clever.
Seriously, though, thank you. I don’t know how this concept is so difficult for the majority of posters in this thread.
Are you really claiming that they’re not pretentious just because they like their pretentious drinks?
or have I woken up on Bizzaro World again? I hate when that happens.
“me am not pretentious, me am not liking pretentious drinks”
Yeah, it was. “Barista” came in with this godawful Starbucks revolution in which I apparently am unable to survive without having a shitty coffee outlet within line-of-sight for 99.9% of my waking existence. I reject it, and I reject the notion that I am in some manner being supplied with a top-of-the-line caffeinated product, the result of many months of careful training from Nepalese coffee monks. If it were that tricky to do, Baristas would drive Porsches and there’s no way they could staff three Starbucks, two Cafe Neros and a Whooping Coffee every 15 yards of the high street. But somehow they do get staff, and for some strange reason they look exactly like the guys two doors down serving Egg McMuffins™.
It’s like waitron, or God knows what else. You know what? Self-respect and/or professional respect doesn’t come from having a fancy bleeding name, it comes from doing what you do well. I don’t want to call the pimply misanthrope handing me my burnt ventissimochachupacabra a fucking barista, any more than I want to call the guy who hums behind me on the Tube “maestro”. If they make me a nice coffee I’ll appreciate it (especially so if it’s the guy behind me on the Tube). More likely I will let them hand me my insipid oily brew, maybe pausing to enquire whether their shrink-wrapped biscotti have reached an optimum combination of blandness and staleness before I slope off to sugar the foul confection into oblivion. Don’t drink it until it bounces, that’s my motto.
I don’t see why not; it’s no more stupid than co-opting a foreign word which means exactly the same thing. D’you think Italians get metaphysically confused between their coffee baristas and their alcohol baristas? Moreover I don’t see why a new word was needed at all. Are people likely to go into Starbucks and say, “bartender; a flagon of your finest foaming ale”? Really? People had been buying coffee from anonymous waitrons for god knows how long before some sordid sub-existential dread overtook us and we had to start nicking poncy words from people who’d rather keep them to themselves, thankyouverymuch.
I’ll give it this: it’s better than “Caffeinated Beverage Engineer”. But just barely.
And yes I do know you’re not mad keen on the word yourself, and no I’m really not that bothered by it; I’m just having a bit of fun. 
No, the hardest part is dealing with the multiple different types of people in various stages of intoxication who are coming in. The flipping bottles isn’t the skill; but I would argue the customer service aspect of bartending is way higher than that of a coffee shop. I haven’t seen coffee shop patrons sit at the counter all evening and expect conversation from the coffee maker. It may happen, but I don’t hang around in coffee shops, so I wouldn’t really know. It looks far more like an in and out kind of place. And certainly without the inebriation aspect.
I’ve received comments much like that in the OP while bartending, and the difference is, you make a joke of them. I also never considered them anything but the punter trying to be funny - never trying to have a go at me. We sold a lot of “fancy” beer. So I would always get the person who would want a good, old fashioned, American draft/bottle of Bud (or Miller Lite, or Old Style etc), with no fruit flavors, etc. I never once thought they were having a go at me. I drink generic beer too, so I would joke around with them, serve them their drink, and enjoy the better tip I got from not handing them a bottle of Bud and saying “Here’s your bottle of chemical filled gnat’s piss.” Which is pretty much what a bartender told me in some microbrew hell hole to which I was dragged. And to which I oddly enough never returned.
Italy and America are two very different places. In Italy the term has been used for many years. There’s no reason to get confused. In America bartender means the guy who pours you a beer. If we started calling coffee people bartenders yes, there would be an initial confusion and probably more than a few letters written to the editors of local newspapers. Eventually we would adapt. But why? English has so many other foreign words in it, why not barista? It sums up what the coffee guy does without any potential confusion.
Why are people so up in arms over this? Nowhere did fetus say “I’m better than you because I make cappacinoes.” In fact he has denied that explictly on several occassion in this thread. Baristas have a skill set that takes time to develop, just like any other profession. Anyone can be a barista, but it takes talent to be a good one, just like it takes talent to be a good bartender, baseball player, or chef.
What makes a latte pretentious?
Lattes can’t be pretentious. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s like saying ritz crackers are pretentious because saltines are perfectly good. Why do those pretentious fucks have to think they’re so cool with their ritzy fucking crackers.
Sorry if I gave you the impression that I don’t think bartending requires skill. I just used it as an example of a similar occupation to a barista. Superficially it’s not that difficult to pick up the basics, but that doesn’t mean everyone’s good at it and that practice doesn’t make you better at it.
Also, I agree that latte’s aren’t pretentious. Heck, I used to drink similar beverages before I even heard the term “latte”. When I was younger I didn’t like the taste of strong coffee as much, so I’d mix coffee by half with heated milk (instead of 1/3 espresso, 2/3 milk like a real latte).
Since you’re God of Drinks, Arbiter of Coffee Pretentiousness, I suppose there’s not much I could say that would have any effect. Enjoy your ambrosia.
Yeah, it came in. It wasn’t “invented” any more than the English word “bartender” was. We just can’t call ourselves bartenders because our customers would be confused and might ask us to put Bailey’s in their coffee.
Ah, so the maestro gets the favorite treatment, huh? I see how it is. Pretentious maestro coffee elitist. You and your composer/barista friends will be the first against the wall when the revolution comes.
Then you haven’t been to my store. I have one patron with some kind of speech disorder who’s very difficult to understand and always takes a minute to remember the name of his favorite drink, and it’s difficult to make conversation with him, but I stop what I’m doing and talk to him because that’s what will keep him happy while he’s my customer. Additionally, the majority of our patrons have some other unidentified mental disorder which causes them to believe our business is actually a giant library/trashcan, where magazines, empty cups, plates with half-eaten food, etc. should be tossed around with no regard to where they land instead of discarded in the proper receptacles.
Back to the main topic, I only go to my favorite local coffee shop when a particular barista (a client of the computer business I also work for) is working there, and we chat at the counter almost the whole time I’m there. He introduces me to the other regulars and we all chat throughout the late night and early morning.
Starbucks is.
Heh. At some local coffee houses, even though inebriants aren’t served, there’s a pretty damn good amount of inebriation going on. To start off with, my favorite local place is within walking distance of a popular bar, and at last call the drunkards come pouring out into the streets and hop over for coffee if they decide not to smash things up on the road or pay for a taxi.
They probably weren’t. I think I can picture what you’re talking about, which actually is a joke. This guy was just a condescending jackass. I could’ve made a joke out of it, but I was having a long goddamn night and he was preventing me from doing (as another poster mentioned) six different tasks I needed to have done in the next 30 minutes. Part of a bartender’s job description is to weather the offensive idiots who drink too much. As far as I’m concerned, this guy, who wasn’t drunk or stoned in the least, was lucky to get the sterile joke I shot back.
But that does make you pretentious, and probably gay, because what you drank has a French name.
Why don’t you do that, then? Sounds nice. Italian baristas serve both coffee and alcohol, y’know. Tell you what; you can be a semibarista.
Heh; I think one of the reasons barista annoys me is because it sounds vaguely like a revolutionary. “Ambassador, the Baristas have taken the port! We must flee!”
“espresso with milk” = not pretentious, if you’re ordering in English.
“latte” = pretentious, if you’re not ordering in Italian.
Hey, Skippy? “Latte” is Italian, not French. Much like every other pretentious term that’s been thrown around in this thread – espresso, barista, venti, piccolo.
Also, I’ll admit that I’m associating negative connotations with pretention. Is that why you added your sly little gay slur in there, as well?
Half coffee and half milk is a cafe au lait, isn’t it?
She wasn’t describing a latte, she was describing a cafe au lait (that’s French).
Wait, “latte” is pretentious? “Espresso” is pretentious?
Are you on drugs? Wait, I mean, “What drugs are you on”?
Hmmm. I don’t necessarily think the one customer that takes an extra minute to remember the name of his drink is what I am talking about here. And clearing up, well, again, not part of the same thing.
Then I guess it does happen at times. I don’t think it is on the same level, but I could be wrong.
Drunks turning up for a coffee is not the same as people turning up to drink. Different type of thing. Annoying I would agree, but different.
No, they definitely weren’t. And while it is possible that your guy was attacking you, I kinda doubt it. But you were there and I wasn’t.
What the people who would make that joke to me weren’t are “offensive idiots” and I don’t see your guy in that category either. Telling a bad joke, even a bad joke you have heard multiple times before, and even one that even potentially pokes fun at the place you work does not make someone an offensive idiot.
And the fact that you say that “part of a bartender’s job is to weather the offensive idiots who drink too much” in my mind is one of the things that separates the jobs.
I can’t drink coffee anymore. Well, I have to wait until I am almost dead, I suppose, and then have a few pots during the last days.
But I really do love coffee. The best coffee of all is good without milk, sugar, foam, spices, or whatever. The poorer the coffee itself, the more stuff you need to hide it’s shortcomings. Most of the time, I would buy coffee at 7 - 11, if I didn’t make it at home, or at work. The local 7-11 guys knew me, and knew I would be able to tell how old the coffee was. They would even let me just start a new pot myself, in most cases. They have several good coffees, reasonably priced.
I have had starbucks coffee, and don’t like it, even fresh. The fact that they have a long prepackaged explanation of how much I should actually love the burned flavor tells me all I need to know about coffebucks mentality. It also explains how much they pimp putting stuff into the coffee that hides the flavor.
But, the few times I have been there make it easy to understand the OP’s customer’s attitude. Lots of Starbuckers have an attitude about “Can I have a large black coffee?” that is even worse than the resultant cup of hours old bitter crap that you will eventually get. It may not be corporate policy, but it does exist, and it is tolerated. What I don’t understand is why anyone who really wants a cup of black coffee would go there. I tried it once or twice, and never went back. I accompanied others to Starbucks on occasion, but I didn’t get coffee.
You want a real lesson in customer patience, try ordering hot tea at Mickey D’s.
Tris
Does Salsa = Pretentious and Hot Sauce /= Pretentious? If you go into a Mexican restaurant do you ask for a meat filled flat bread roll instead of a burrito? If you say “margarita” while not ordering in Spanish are you pretentious? You’ve just proved it somehow, I’m not exactly sure how but you seem certain of it.
Starbucks and other similar businesses are based on Italian espresso bars, that’s why they use Italian terminology for some things. What’s the frickin harm in that? Now just tell me if I can say hors d’oeuvres without offending your tender world view and I will happily be on my way. 
I have essentially given up trying to drink hot tea outside of my home in the US. I am sure there are places that know how to make it properly, but I cannot find them, nor can I really be bothered to look.
But that is a whole different rant.
You can always pronounce it “expresso,” which sounds less pretentious, but more ignorant.
“Latte” does sound a little pretentious, though. Even if it is just coffee and milk, there’s just something about the word. The kind of word a jaded blue-collar coffee anti-elitist might use to express his disdain at all the uppity yuppie jerks who sit around in their cafés looking down their noses at people and banging on their expensive laptops while listening to “world music” and sipping their precious lattes. Snobby pricks, thinkin’ they’re better than me. I’ll show them who’s better.