When visiting an unfamiliar place, finding good coffee is maybe one of the more challenging things a person can do. I don’t mean good-with-a-qualifier-that-actually-means-bad-but-what-can-you-do coffee, I mean honest-to-goodness good coffee. (If only there was a website with 15 years of reporting on cafes the world over, with hundreds of city guides and a searchable map feature, all for free.)
One “hack”, as was proffered in a recent Washington Post article penned by comedian Alex Falcone, is to head to the nearest “two-star coffee shop.” But does this actually work? We decided to investigate.
There’s certainly merit to the suggestion. I’ve used a similar tack when, say, trying to find good Asian cuisine in an area that isn’t exactly a cultural hub, as popularized in this post on X from user Freddie Wong (from whom Falcone’s article concept seems, shall we say, gently lifted). Wong posits that the poor ratings from these places are generally due to unfamiliarity with a non-Americanized version of the food. People going into a Chinese food restaurant wanting orange chicken probably might not know what to do with a really good mapo tofu.
Based on the article, Falcone’s methodology appears to be at least somewhat different. He name drops shops like Coava in Portland and Parlor in Brooklyn as the type of hard-to-find shop he is after. Regardless of what your preferred review site is—Yelp, Google, etc—these are not two-star shops. We checked: nowhere on the internet do these shops actually have two stars. In fact, they all have damn near perfect ratings. The secret sauce, then, must not be in aggregate, but in poring over individual two-star reviews. The particular sort of review we are looking for, the ones that serve as indication that the shop is actually good are of the “the barista was so rude, but the coffee was good” ilk.
I put this theory to the test in earnest. Sure it’s maybe the most mind-numbing, lowest common denominator means to this particular end, reading Yelp reviewers (the worst people in the world) prattle on self-righteously about how they don’t get it, but I’ve done worse in search of coffee. I wanted this to work. I checked out objectively good cafes big and small in Los Angeles, Seattle, Portland, New York, Philly, and honestly? These sorts of 2-star reviews don’t really exist, or at least not in quantities high enough to make it a useful heuristic. So I tried smaller cities, where perhaps the population at large may not have caught up to the “third wave” trend at the same pace. I tried cafes in Omaha and Wichita and Amarillo that I know for a fact are top notch and I couldn’t find the “bad service, good coffee” reviews.
And the reason for this, I think, is because the average coffee consumer’s perception of a drink being good or bad is based more so on their experience than the drink itself. It’s not really breaking news in specialty coffee, who has for years fought to legitimize itself by being self-serious only to then fight the perception of being too “snobby”. If a shop makes someone feel stupid, they aren’t going to like the drink. I know I have had the experience of what should have been a cup of coffee squarely in my wheelhouse tarnished by a too cool for school barista, and I seemingly should know better.
So no, reading two-star reviews is not a good or accurate way to find quality coffee. And I know I’m probably just dissecting the frog here, but this was published in The Washington Post! Published not as an op-ed or humor piece but as a bona fide tip in their travel section, in one of the biggest newspapers in the entire country! This sort of coffee writing is what passes muster? Repackaging tired hipster barista tropes—but not for evil, for good!—and ripping off a viral tweet. That’s what we’re reading? That’s where mainstream coffee writing has landed in 2024? This is as far as we’ve come?
And so it is once again that I must lament that if only there was a completely free coffee-focused website that has well over a decade’s worth cafe features in towns big and small the world over, with city guides and a digital map of coffee shops around the globe, the whole process of finding good coffee wherever you are would be a whole lot easier. If only.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.