Coffee, sugar and cream

A couple of weeks back, my wife and I had a long discussion on the operations of the coffee counter at Maiya’s in Jayanagar. It was an interesting discussion since while I was extremely familiar with the operations there (having gone there almost every other day for the last year), the wife was seeing them for the first time.

My hypothesis was that it was the structure of the coffee+tiffin combo and not accounting for multiple orders in one ticket that caused the congestion. The wife’s diagnosis was rather different – she recognised the sugar counter as the bottleneck.

Most South Indian restaurants have ready two kinds of boiling milk – one with sugar and one without, and your choice of milk (or a linear combination) can be added to decoction to make coffee of the required sweetness for you. Maiya’s does it differently. They only have unsweetened milk, and you need to add the sugar yourself.

So there is sugar placed in a bowl beyond the coffee counter where you add the sugar, get yourself a spoon (inconveniently placed before the coffee counter which means you stretch across) and go on while stirring the coffee. For non-regular customers (my untested hypothesis is that most Maiya’s customers are regulars), this is a novelty and leads to inefficiency of the full queue.

The wife argued that if Maiya’s were to keep both sweetened and unsweetened milk (like other restaurants), sugar could come pre-mixed in the coffee and the bottleneck could be eliminated. Since the barista doesn’t multitask (he fills exactly one cup at a time), there is no problem in miscommunication, etc.

The problem is that turnover of the unsweetened milk in other establishments is not high enough to maintain quality. The thing with the milk is that it needs to be constantly stirred, or at least poured from, for cream to not form in it (such cream can make the coffee gross). When the demand for a particular kind of milk (usually unsweetened) is low, it is not stirred enough, and cream forms. And then when you ask for coffee without sugar (or “less sugar” – remember linear combinations of the milks are possible) you end up with cream in your coffee.

This happened to me twice in the last three days. On Saturday I was having coffee at Hatti (opposite Maiya’s), asked for “strong, less sugar”, which meant I got some of the unsweetened milk, which means there was cream in my coffee. I had to spit out some to make it palatable. And the story repeated itself at the Vasudev Adigas in Jayanagar 8th Block on Sunday. Nice tasting coffee made gross by the cream.

It is to solve this problem that Maiya’s perhaps has only one kind of milk – it is constantly boiling away and being poured from, and there is no cream. And you get superior quality coffee. For which I’m willing to pay a premium.

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