Walking past a Starbucks in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood yesterday, I noticed the promotion in the window for Oleato, the company’s new line of olive-oil infused coffee drinks, and felt compelled to give it a try.
If you’re just catching up, this is Howard Schultz’s swan song, the purported result of a breakthrough discovery that he made on trip to Italy last summer, revisiting the country that inspired him to make Starbucks what it is today.
In the opinion of the former Starbucks CEO, putting olive oil into coffee is a “bold innovation” that’s part of a “truly extraordinary experience.”
Extraordinary, yes. Innovative, no. But not as bad as you might think.
That’s my amateur take after trying three versions of the olive oil coffee. I was bracing for the worst based on early reviews, including this withering take by Gideon Lewis-Kraus in the New Yorker, describing a “slick, oleaginous sediment” and adding, “There was little to say but that it tasted like a large spoonful of olive oil in coffee.”
Personally, I don’t think that was entirely fair. A single pump of olive oil in a warm drink, complemented by oat milk, nicely balanced the espresso in a 12 oz. hot latte, for at least the first 2/3 of the drink. But then I encountered some concentrated olive oil that had settled toward the bottom, and it was almost too much.
So, next time, I’ll be swirling the coffee as I go, to keep the mix even throughout the drink. But I would definitely order it again. The friendly barista gave me samples of the shaken espresso and foam cold-brew variations, and those were not for me. The olive oil was just too strong. But in a warm drink, I think it works.
Catching up on recent reviews this morning, I see that Li Goldstein, a writer for Bon Appetit who by definition is more qualified than I am to make this assessment, agrees that this the way to go.
“I was most enticed by this option because a hot latte is normally my coffee of choice,” Goldstein wrote in a March 30 piece. “My friend astutely noted that the nuttiness of the oat milk cut the olive oil taste, subtly complementing rather than dominating the beverage, and I agreed. Unsurprisingly, this one ended up being my favorite of the three, and the only one that I actively wanted to drink more of.”
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