Manon … Manoff …

Note that I haven’t really posted here in some time; oh well, it’s been a slow … erm … 18 months.

*ahem*

Easing back into things, I wanted to note that my preferences for different coffee shops – and even (slightly) for my favourite tipple – have changed a little over this time.

When last we spoke, my favourite “chain” coffee shop was Costa Coffee, followed (probably) by Caffe Nero then Starbucks; and my favourite drink, a medio latte with extra shot (or grande at Nero / Starbucks). The monumental (not really) changes came about for two reasons; a new shop opening, and my deciding that I was drinking too much milk.

The last 18 months have been quite eventful; I decided to get a hold of my health, lost nearly 2 stone (roughly 28 lbs or 15 kilos for our American cousins and those who work in metric) and ran a couple of half-marathons. As part of this process I decided I was drinking too much milk in my coffee, but having been corrupted by lattes didn’t want to go back to an americano as my day-in-day-out drink … so (ingeniously) I decided instead to go low-fat and have skinny lattes instead. Like I said, genius.

Only problem with this is that – oddly – Costa’s skinny latte isn’t actually all that good. Following the opening of a Nero opposite my office – pretty much equidistant to the Costa – whilst I was convalescing me knee after a skiing accident (don’t ask), I discovered that Nero’s skinny latte is actually very good. Better than their ‘regular’ latte, in fact. And because they make their coffee a little stronger, there’s no need for an extra shot – so it’s actually a little cheaper than Costa. And they have a better loyalty scheme than Costa (see here). So my go-to drink nowadays is a grande skinny latte from Caffe Nero. So there.

Anyway, that’s not actually what I wanted to talk about. No, the actual point of this post was simply to give a shout-out to Manon Cafe on Fleet Street (that’s the store at the top of the page, shame that their photographer was so half-arsed that the picture of the shop isn’t level, but hey ho …). Selling Illy coffee, and giving away a free belgian chocolate with each drink – if it was a little closer (or had a loyalty card) it’d be my coffee shop of choice.

So there we go; back in the saddle and (hopefully) back for the long haul. We shall see …