Please Stop Serving Your Lattes Inside Produce

Stretch your eye muscles so they don’t get hurt from rolling too hard — an Australian cafe has now succeeded in serving a coffee inside a hollowed-out carrot.

British publication The Independent reports that Locals Corner, a cafe in Seaforth (part of Sydney, Australia) succeeded at serving a milk-based espresso beverage in the orange root vegetable on Sunday afternoon (it’s not technically a latte, at least until some cafe manages to find a carrot with room for 12 ounces of liquid).

Worse yet, this isn’t even Locals Corner’s first attempt — back in February, they managed to serve a coffee in a hollowed-out apple.

It’s yet another extension of one of the year’s most frivolous trends — another Australian cafe scored copious attention for creating the “avolatte,” initially a joke until the coffee shop realized it could be a moneymaker. It’s not just an antipodean thing: a cafe in Denton, Texas (near Dallas) made a tomato cortado. The avolatte is probably the least offensive, since it was just in the leathery skin of an avocado — a tomato is much more porous, meaning the cortomato was probably an unappetizing mix of coffee, hot milk, and tomato mush.

In case you weren’t aware, coffee has been served in ceramic containers — or at least in cups unlikely to leach a distinctive flavor into your drink — for a very long time. Presumably these aren’t attempts to fuse coffees with new flavors, since (as pumpkin spice lattes have taught the world) some sort of concentrate would do a much better job.

Rather, they appear to be a cry for attention — the liberal use of hashtags like “Instagood” on the apple coffee is a red flag for this. They’re a victory for style over substance; Instagram likes over a pleasurable coffee-drinking experience. And they should stop, lest the coffee world turn into a hollowed-out husk of its former self, just like the vegetables some baristas are using as coffee holders.

• Carrot-cino: coffee hipsters have finally gone too far [The Independent]