The Australian Open is officially underway and there’s a lot of intrigue this year. Will the GOAT in training Carlos Alcaraz become the youngest male player ever to complete the Career Slam at just 21 years of age? Will the high-seeded American women Coco Gauff and Emma Navarro bring home the title (to say nothing of the crop of promising American male tennis players, who haven’t won in Melbourne since Agassi in 2003) or will flagless Belarusian masher Aryna Sabalenka make it a threepeat? These are all great questions, but they fail in comparison to the biggest quandary of them all: where the hell is all the coffee?
Australia is one of the great coffee drinking countries (of which they will no doubt let you know) and Melbourne is perhaps the most coffee-obsessed Australian city of all. Flatties and cuppas and avo toasties, whether or not they originated from the island nation is fiercely debated, but it’s hard to contest the fact that Australia brought these things to prominence. So when the country hosts one of the tennis season’s premier events—the first Grand Slam of the year—it is reasonable to expect not just good quality coffee but a lot of it. But that’s not exactly the reality for attendees to the Melbourne Park grounds.
As reported by Reuters, Tennis Australia states there are 15 coffee outlets on the 40-hectare grounds, which is around one coffee shop per six acres. Let’s be honest, these are rookie numbers. The tennis grounds at the Australian Open may be the only place in all of Melbourne so sparse. Combine that with the more than 90,000 attendees every day and it’s a recipe for disaster. Especially when there is inclement weather halting any game not happening indoors—a regular occurrence at this Slam—giving attendees a chance to get up from their seats and mill about the grounds, and y’know, get a quick caffeine boost.
One person interviewed stated they had to wait over half an hour for a cup of coffee, of the takeaway variety, not the sit in and order variety the country is known for. Now, 30 minutes isn’t outrageous. Having once tried to buy literally anything at Roland Garros, a 30-minute wait for coffee seems within reason to me. It’s a shitshow, waits are expected. Still, another attendee said it took them “a day and a half, and several kilometres of walking around the grounds, to find coffee.”
But this is Australia, and the expectation for coffee here is not like elsewhere, perhaps second only to Italy in their vigor (perhaps). This is the same country where Serena Williams famously asked for a shot of espresso mid-match, and got it. (The espresso was from Northbridge Coffee in Perth, in case you were wondering.)
This is all burying the lede though. The real question in all of this is: who is serving the coffee? When taking a digital tour of the Melbourne Park, only two of the 15 locations can be found, both of which are operated by Urban Cup, who have basically no easily searchable web presence. So where—and who—are the other 13 spots? Well, one of the event’s sponsors is none other than Luckin Coffee, the Chinese-based fast coffee brand trying to challenge Starbucks. Are they running the other locations? And if so, does that mean the coffee-proud Australians outsourced their most beloved beverage to a Starbucks knock off?
If true, this would be the gravest of sins. And frankly I’m not sure how any coffee professional in Melbourne recovers from this slight. Sydney would never. I can almost hear Jack Simpson booking a moving truck as we speak.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
