I do too. It’s not been my experience in Italy, but then again, I’ve never tried to order a cappuccino in the afternoon (I don’t drink them, even in the morning).
I’m not sneering, but I don’t know why you put “breakfast” in quotes. If an Italian walked into a diner in America and asked for oatmeal for lunch or dinner, they might be told “no, we don’t serve breakfast after 11am” – and it might even say so on the menu. And if several million Italian tourists arrived in America each year asking for oatmeal for lunch and dinner, after a while American servers might exchange a few looks, wondering: “Don’t guidebooks have tips about American eating customs?” A cappuccino is a breakfast item in Italy, and it will forever be odd to an Italian if you want to have at 5pm.
Probably. I’ve never been in one. They appear to be aimed at youth drinking crowd, and the drinks are very cheap. But a few might be holdovers from the war. During the American occupation of Italy, cafe owners hung signs on their doors saying “American Bar” if they had finally started stocking whiskey and other liquors American soldiers came in asking for, and if they had learned how to make American cocktails. It is still a common term for any cocktail bar in Italy – an American bar.
I once got lost in Camden town in London looking for the entrance to the tube, and after my 3rd go-round in the cold rain, I finally decided to go into a pub and ask directions. When I pushed open the door and entered, every face in the crowd — all male – turned to look at me through the smoke – and the place went DEAD QUIET. It flashed through my mind immediately that (a) I might have been the first woman ever to cross that threshold in the history of the establishment and (b) I really do look very, very Irish, and might that be a problem too? I summoned up my very best California-American voice and loudly asked for the directions to the tube – at which point every man in there instantly turned into the most gracious and most solicitous gentleman of good breeding you could hope to meet. One of them gallantly put on his coat to walk me to the Tube entrance.
If I can say just one more thing about Mr Schultz and Starbucks:
It seems to me that prior to the creation of Starbucks, most people in America knew where they could get a big cup of coffee that they personally liked for less than a dollar, or where they could sit somewhere drinking a “bottomless” cup of coffee for as long as they liked. Mr Schultz was trying to sell Americans on a premium product at a much higher price point, and to do that, you simply have to sell them not just coffee, but also a song and dance, or some perception of receiving value beyond a cup of coffee. That value — it appears to me – was the notion that one was having a more sophisticated experience of coffee drinking, in the Italian style. But there is no reality to that if you know how Italians drink coffee. Beyond selling people an image, I think the real success of Starbucks is that they sell sugary, fatty concoctions and baked goods.
Interstingly, the New York Times article points out that Schultz plans to sell coffee in Italy at a much lower price point than Starbucks in the US. Italians would simply never pay what Starbucks typically charges for a a shot of espresso. So I don’t know how Schultz is planning to make money in Italy. He obviously can’t sell Italians on an Italian experience of drinking coffee as something special, and while he talks of bringing Italians the “Starbucks experience”, I haven’t a clue what that is – but young Italians are forever enamoured of what they imagine America is, so maybe the branding will be enough.