Cats & Dogs

I’m going to try to keep this short. It’s just an observation I’ve stretched out; a 30ml espresso subject to a hot shower and turned into a 60ml americano.

I spend a reasonable amount of time at coffee shops. My line of work lets me and I love the stuff. I’ve been visiting these merchants of buzz from the turn of the century, when they first began to appear in the large Indian cities.

My café of choice in Delhi is the Café Coffee Day. This chain has at least 4 outlets within 2 kilometers of my home in South Delhi. Of these, I get my daily fix from a particular outlet, whose staff I have trained to get my cappuccino just right (Double-shot, not watery, thick foam on top)

My daily poison

They know that I will send it back if its not to my liking, and more than once at that. Yet, despite the regular training, their best intentions and my large tips (20%, every single time), mishaps happen at least once a week.

But the young boys and girls at CCD (as the kids who visit this café call it) are both accommodating and eager to please, especially if you give them a chance to polish their English with you and are not condescending about it.

So, I get my coffee the way I like it, even if it takes a couple of times. There’s no fuss, just a look of disappointment at not having earned my compliment at round one and a “how’z your coffee this time, sir?” when I taste the second attempt.

I’m not the only one getting away with high service expectations there. Aunties who complain that their Paneer Rolls are not fresh enough get replacements, and Uncles who find the coffee shop mileu unfamiliar (whose caffeine discrimination is binary – 'Hot' or 'Cold' - coffee) are not looked down upon here.

Barista, the other large chain of a similar vintage in Indian metros, is well, a different cup of coffee. I do visit a Barista once in a while for a fix, but when I do, I lower my expectations on service.

The staff (a high proportion of them, good looking, sharp young men and women, from the North Eastern states,) is more aligned to the convent educated English speaker, the Delhi PLU (People-Like-Us) set.

Keeping with the theme, there’s the guitar to strum and Scrabble and Pictionary, but the water is self-service, in small paper cups (much to the chagrin of the occasional Punjabi Uncle who goes “Bete, pehle pani toh pila do”, to the young man delivering the coffee to the table, only to be coldly pointed to the jug on the counter)

You can send back stuff at the Barista too, but are likely to meet with resistance from behind the counter, especially if it’s a cuppa you send back. You’re likely to get a “This is how we always make a cuppuccino sir…” at Round One. If you still insist on doing it your way, they might follow it up with a “What you’re asking for is a latte…is that what you want?” and go on to describe the ingredients, the intention being to embarrass you at the very least.

It’s like the difference between traveling on Singapore Airlines versus British Airways on a long haul flight. Both are nice in their own ways, but where the Asian air hostess will give you little bottles of water any number of times on Sing, the European girls on BA will lay out the short eats and water at the galley and retire to chit-chat with each other. The third time you buzz the BA girl on a 8-hour flight, you realize that the temperature inside the cabin can also drop to minus 42-degrees C, to match the outside.

I thought that Barista may be hiring youngsters with more years of formal English education, but the boys at CCD tell me that the educational qualifications are the same for both chains; you just need to have cleared your 12^th standard school-leaving exams. And yet, each seems to have an additional filter in the hiring process, based on some additional unwritten criteria, that gives them very different personnel.

Now even my stretched Americano’s down to the bottom. One last gulp before we go our ways – if the CCD youngsters were to be seen as a familiar animal, they would be dogs - friendly, eager to please and easy to train.

I’ve tried to train the Baristas once, with the same degree of custom, tipping and discipline as the CCD boys, but it just wouldn’t work. Cats look elegant, but don’t fetch newspapers.