Food Corner

I never tasted coffee till that winter morning when my roommate and I trudged into the campus cafeteria, and I suddenly discovered my ears were gone!

Well, not literally, only temporarily. That 15-minute walk to class had

obviously done it. I reached for my ears, and I couldn't feel a thing! So my first cup of coffee was really born out of necessity. But it was the most comforting drink I'd ever tasted.

For one thing, I recovered my ears within minutes. For another, I found out that, contrary to what I'd been told as a child, coffee didn't taste bitter at all. Who would have thought that one cup of coffee would lead so quickly to the next? For the rest of the winter school session, it became our morning ritual to stop by the cafeteria to find relief for our frozen ears.

Coffee is one of those things that grows on you. Once you get started, it's hard to stop. Luckily a good cup of coffee isn't hard to come by these days, provided you are prepared to fork out a small fortune.

A while ago, I bumped into Dad at a shopping mall, and asked him to join me for lunch. But since he'd just had his, I asked him to order a drink and sit with me anyway. He casually ordered a cup of coffee, and waved the waiter away.

But the insistent waiter kept shoving the menu in front of him "just in case" he decided to change his mind about ordering a whole meal. After scanning the menu, Dad was strangely silent for a while. As I watched him savor his first sip of this precious coffee, I could see why.

You see, Dad belongs to a generation that has watched the price of a cup of coffee soar from a few cents to a ringgit-something at the corner coffee shop where he hangs out with his old foggies. But seven-ringgit-fifty is unheard of for a few gulps of coffee, no matter what you tell him.

Since that day, that small cup of coffee has become a 'hot' topic whenever the old foggies get together and talk about how things have changed over the years.
In all honesty, I myself have been slow to subscribe to this concept of designer coffee. I'm the instant coffee kind of person. I don't drink coffee enough times a day to have a need for a coffee maker, and I'm not a great fan of the coffee shop kind of brewed coffee either. So when these new-fangled cafes started popping up all over the city, I couldn't think of any good reason why I should patronize them.

And yet, I notice these cafes are always bustling with the up-and-coming crowd. It is completely beyond me why anyone would fork out a small fortune simply to sit out on the terrace and "be seen".

For the longest time, I remained unconvinced. My first encounter with designer coffee was out of courtesy, a social obligation. A friend decided to splurge on an ice-blended something-or-other, and insisted it was so good I should order the same. I declined, she insisted.

So I said, "OK, just this once, because I really can't see why I should pay an atrocious 20 bucks plus tax for a glass of iced coffee. I mean, what's this stuff anyway? Black gold??"

"Oh, come on, you'll love it, it's really good!!" she insisted.

And that was how I got sold to the idea. Frankly, I have to admit it did taste great especially with that scoop of Haagen Daaz blended in.

And yet there's a limit to how far you would want to go with something as commonplace as a cup of coffee. I mean, I do stop by for an occasional cup of designer coffee simply to conform to social expectations if nothing else. And I do succumb to the odd craving for ice-blended coffee when the weather outside is unbearably hot. But I wouldn't go much further than that just to be fashionable.