What about Teaism? It’s a local teahouse chain universally praised for its teas, widely praised for its baked goods (and moderately praised for its pan-Asian food offerings).
Thanks pizzabrat, I will give that a try.
It has just taken me way too long (11+ years) to adjust to the fact that I have to “go out” if I want a good cup of tea, rather than just nipping across the street for a cuppa.
And if it costs more than 50p, and comes in anthing buy a chipped white mug, I will be hunting you down. The leftovers from the pot should also be suitable to re-tar the streets of DC. 
Well, then, you’d better not go to Teaism. It’s a favorite of mine (why won’t they expand to Northern Virginia?), but it’s based on Japanese and Chinese tea traditions, not the aul English cuppa. There are dozens of big tea storage bins behind the counter and you get your tea in a ceramic pot.
That’s not the way they do it in England? Huh. I’ve seen depictions of the English pouring brewed tea out of (I assume ceramic) teapots into cups - what’s the difference? The fact that there’s no such thing as an single-serve teapot?
At Teaism, you drink your tea from a Japanese-style hand-made, painted, and fired clay pot with a matching lid (kind of like these). In England, you use white china tea sets (chipped ones, as Villa noted).
No, I really will try it. I have nothing against a good tea shop at all. I was more bemoaning (jokingly) the absence of market cafe type places near me here, where you can walk in and they pour your tea out of a huge metal teapot, strong enough to put hairs on your mother’s chest.
I was kind of trying to keep inline with the jaded blue-collar anti-elitism thing… 
Heh. You know, You’re right. I’ve always felt a bit uncomfortable ordering lattes in the States, but I have no problem doing it here. That’s because the Hebrew term for the drink is hafuch, which means “backwards”, or “reverse”, or “upside-down” (because instead of adding the milk to the coffee, you add the coffee to the milk - get it?). Stepping up to the bar at Aroma or CafeNeto and ordering a small cuppa backwards doesn’t feel pretentious one bit.
Of coure, around here if you order “black” you’ll get Turkish. Drip perculators are virtually unheared of.
Am I the only one who thinks all the sniping over Starbucks as “pretentious” is hysterical??? I mean, isn’t this the place generally looked down upon by aficionados as having ruined the local “pretentious” coffee shop?
If Starfucks is pretentious, what is not pretentious? I like Dunkin Donuts coffee but haven’t seen it out west.
Starfucks, Coffee Bean and Tea and the far far superior Tim Horton’s and Second Cup (seriously, Canadians take chains and make them better) all give you a standardised corporate-stamped experience. I’ll say this, I don’t necessarily like the taste (Starfuck’s always tastes a bit bitter to me) but at least it’s not Give-You-The-Shits 7-11/gas station coffee.
To me the quibbling over lattamochafrappa and whatever Starfucks wants to call its employees and drinks is like saying Target is pretentious.
Drinking a latte is about as pretentious as driving a minivan.
“Oh, look at me! I’m driving a minivan! Yeah, baby, I’m all about the ability to fit six kids and their gym bags into one vehicle! Check out the roomy interior and sensible styling! Check out the fuel economy! Those ignorant fucks driving their sedans and SUVs are gonna piss their pants in envy when they see me pull up in minivanista! Yeah, but it’s not so much that I want to drive a minivan as it is that I want to be SEEN driving a minivan. It’s a STATEMENT, baby! It tells everyone that I live on the edge. I make my own rules. And those pencil-pushers back at headquarters can go fuck themselves if they don’t like it.”
“I want a car. A plain, American car. A sedan, with 4 doors. No sliding doors, no third seat, just two bench seats and a shifter on the column like God intended. And I want an 8-track player; no fancy CD thingy or pretentious iPod jack.”
Though apparently people around here have no problem buying pretentious coffee drinks so long as they can get them with a side of good old-fashioned sexism:
When you say “burned flavor”, are you talking dark roasted coffee? Because a lot of folks, myself included, do legitimately enjoy that, and not strictly at *$ either.
Ah, my apologies. An error caused no doubt by my misinterest in what you all are calling that nasty drink nowadays. (how’s that for pretentious?)
Although a quick googling seems to indicate that the former is espresso with hot milk, and the latter coffee with hot milk. Still seems it would make life easier to just say that when you want to order, and leave some gray matter free to remember if a venti is a “medium” or “large” or “too damn big for anyplace but America”.
Wait, so just because you don’t like coffee/espresso with milk, you think everyone else is just PRETENDING to like it? That they’re grimacing inside as they try to force the nasty brew past their gullets, but consoling themselves with the knowledge that all the other hipsters are watching them drink a latte, and what counts is appearing cool?
Your contention is that if people say “Gimme a latte” it’s pretentious, but “gimme an espresso with steamed milk” it isn’t pretentious?
Now who’s being pretentious? “I refuse to bow down to the sheeplike conformity of using borrowed Italinate terms for coffee! Fight the power!” Oh, you’re a rebel, you are.
“Ohhhh, PIZZA. What are you, some kind of faggot? Well, lah-di-dah, Mister Snooty Italian Fancy-Pants. I know you pretentious hipsters like to go down to the “Pizzaria” and eat your overbaked overpriced tomato and cheese pie served by some college drop-out with delusions of grandeur (it’s no harder to bake a tomato and cheese pie than it is to make a fucking hamburger, assholes!) and impress each other with your fancy European vocabulary and your “mozzarella” cheese and your “marinara” sauce and your “pepperoni”, which doesn’t even exist in Italy, you stupid fucks! You make me sick! English, Motherfucker! Do you speak it?”
so Lightray doesn’t like words that boil down lengthy descriptions?
Is that the Straight Dope standard on pretentiousness? I need some clarification, because right now my jaw muscles are extending my mouth outwards and upwards, showing my (orthodontically perfected) teeth, the end result of social evolution in primates developed to indicate submission, fear, now primarily friendliness.
I’d say “smile” but I don’t want to be pretentious.
Look at me! I’m a SOCCER MOM! La-di FRICKIN DA!
Oh, please. Get your knickers in a twist all you want, but it’s still terminology that’s confusing to everybody not in the coffee subculture.
The names being used are for exaggerated importance or dignity, not for clarity of ordering. We’ve seen that attested to in this thread. Some day “latte” might be adopted into the vernacular as “pizza” has been.
“Some day” is today, at least where I live. It’s not a subculture word, it’s a workaday word.
It’s definitely a “coffee people subculture” word from my experience, along with any number of other words about which I could tell you “That’s from a Starbucks menu!” and not much else. But I don’t drink coffee, and rather pick my destination based on the quality of their hot chocolate - a category in which Starbucks comes up woefully short.
(Also, I’ve definitely experienced an elitist attitude at times from the people behind the counter at that sort of place. I tried to get some coffee to take home once for a guest - apparently coffee drinkers don’t like it when the coffee sitting around the house is the same stuff you had for their last visit three years prior, who knew? - and was asking some basic questions about what was good/cheap/etc (during a down time with no other customers there) since I am basically clueless about coffee… and got some definite snobbery about how ignorant I was from the staff. Not that I defend any number of the other things going on in this thread. I just make sure I stop somewhere else for my hot chocolate.)
Also, “coffee people” are just generally insane. I feel that this thread isn’t complete without that observation.