Starbucks

If I were to write a book about my life, Starbucks would figure in it prominently.  I've been drinking coffee there for half my life.  Sad to say, their espresso drinks are not worth getting anymore, now that they are dispensed automatically by those fancy machines.  You'll never again get a truly great (or a truly hideous) shot from Starbucks.  So it's drip coffee, then.  As it should be.

I like to think back to the days of opening the store at 5:30 am, and how we would reserve ourselves some of the blueberry scones for breakfast.  Of course, those scones exist only in my memory.  Nowadays people wouldn't stand for them.  Not enough icing or sugar crystals.  Too dry and weird tasting.  You could choke on it if you weren`t careful, and the blueberries were too goddamn real for people to handle.  I loved them.

So, the Terminal & Begg Street Starbucks.  Not all that far from the Terminal & Main Starbucks, I believe this one exists to serve the employees of the various nearby carpeting stores and car dealerships.  It also has a Drive-Thru, reinforcing its similarity to a fast food joint.  By all rights it should be a dreadful place, but inside it's nice and dimly lit and you can actually sit quite peacefully, if you care to, and watch the traffic jam outside.

Today I went for the infamous lemon cranberry scone.  To be blunt, this is the McDonald's cheeseburger of scones.  It's been around a long time and it's always exactly the same, give or take a few cranberries.  As we all know (especially those of us who survived the pastry strike of '98), Starbucks pastries are mass produced by some industrial bakery and delivered the night before.  This is not a good thing.

The weight and texture always surprises me.  If you were participating in a protest that had turned violent, and looking for something nearby to hurl at the local constabulary, this scone would be an excellent choice.  Its edges are sharp enough to put your eye out, and heavy enough to smash through that fascist shop owner's window.
The flour this scone is made of somehow redefines one's idea of refined white flour.  It's not like any other baked good I've ever had.  It seems to have been created in a chemist`s lab rather than grown from wheat and milled.  I can't understand it.  It somehow tastes terrible but you keep eating it, because it's so sweet and addictive.  I must say, it's absolutely covered in pretty tasty lemon icing.  But it seems stale, somehow, under all that icing.  How can it possibly be so hard to bite into something so full of fat and sugar?  It resists you.  The icing is so artificial.  You soon come to regret the choices you've made.

It's inexplicable how I've eaten more of these lemon scones than I care to count.  I can only think this is because I'm always trying to recapture the joy of the utterly perfect lemon cranberry scone that Second Cup at Lonsdale Quay used to have, which is everything that this one is not.  But Starbucks put them out of business and moved in with their own second-rate version.  Then there is the ubiquity of this blasted scone- there's a Starbucks on every corner and a lemon-cran scone in every pastry case.

Overall: 1 / 5