Russell Brown has been having a long series of posts about coffee in New Zealand and how it stacks up compared to those around the world, culminating in this monster post.
I’m certainly prepared to believe that coffee in many of the places New Zealanders tend to go is shit; my own experience confirms that England is a barren wasteland of a place; this is the country that’s can still find pockets of people suspicious that garlic is foreign much, though, so it’s hardly surprising. I was disappointed by coffee in Melbourne (not bad, merely indifferent), and while I enjoyed reasonable coffee in New Caledonia, I was surprised by the absence of lattes.
(Of course, my preference for said latte marks me, in the minds of the taking-coffee-rectally crowd as a barbarian whose opinion may be considered uninteresting.)
However, if we do coffee well, hot chocolate has yet to catch up.
Hot chocolate in New Zealand is almost uniformly sweet, mostly cloyingly so. It’s the equivalent of a sweet dairy milk; if that’s what you’re in the mood for, great. However, there’s more than one kind of eating chocolate, but it’s all too rare that there’s more than one kind of drinking chocolate available.
While we were in New Caledonia Maire subsisted on the local cafes’ hot chocolate, which was rich and bittersweet, like a good dark chocolate. It’s all but impossible to get that here; Il Casino import their own from Italy, but other than that it’s scarcely in evidence.