baroque nihilism
taste-testing the Starbucks Oleato™
Because I’m Italian-American and because I feel most alive at the intersection of delight and horror, I was excited to hear that a new fucked-up Starbucks drink was on the scene: the Starbucks Oleato,™ a line of “artisanal” olive oil-infused coffee and espresso beverages.
The Starbucks Reserve Roastery in Milan, Italy offers a suite of exclusive Oleato™ beverages, including the Oleato™ Iced Cortado and the Oleato™ Deconstructed, the description of which raises more questions than answers: "An ode to the Italian tradition of combining olive oil with a squeeze of lemon. This beverage pairs Starbucks Reserve Espresso and Partanna extra virgin olive oil infused with a luxurious passionfruit cold foam.” The most chaotic drink of all, and the one that I am most sad doesn’t exist stateside, is the Oleato™ Golden Foam™ Espresso Martini—“Starbucks Reserve Espresso, vodka and vanilla bean syrup topped with golden foam.” American menus are limited to the Oleato™ Caffè Latte, the Oleato™ Golden Foam™ Cold Brew, and the Oleato™ Iced Shaken Espresso, all of which seem disappointingly straightforward, as far as pouring olive oil into sweetened coffee goes.
This greasy and unholy marriage of vaguely Italian liquids is the brainchild of Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz, who was struck with inspiration while visiting an olive oil producer in Sicily. (Like Zuckerberg’s Metaverse, there’s something almost charming about a bizarre and debauched product brought to fruition only because the boss thought of it... almost.) In a February CNN story, Schultz tells his interviewer that the Oleato went into production with “no consumer research whatsoever. Nothing.” In a New Yorker article, he’s quoted: “In over forty years, I can’t remember a moment in time where I’ve been more excited... Coffee’s been around for thousands of years and nobody’s ever thought of mixing the two except me.”
The Starbucks Oleato™ has been in Los Angeles-area stores since late March, but I don’t know anyone who’s actually ordered one. Despite seeming optimized for meme-ification, it’s only appeared on my newsfeed twice—that New Yorker article, which concludes, “There was little to say but that it tasted like a large spoonful of olive oil in coffee,” and a CNN piece entitled “Some customers are complaining the new olive oil-infused Starbucks drink is making them run to the bathroom.”
I opted for the Oleato™ Golden Foam™ Cold Brew, ordered via the app because I was too embarrassed to ask for one in person. It was a 76-degree day in Los Angeles. The neighborhood pool was newly repopulated, and kids held each other’s heads underwater beneath a gentle and eternal blue sky. My Oleato™ Golden Foam™ Cold Brew’s emulsified olive oil cream top withstood the heat impressively; when I got home with it, my first impression was that it seemed suspiciously un-oily.
My second impression, regrettably, was that the Oleato™ Golden Foam™ was delicious. It was full-bodied, like egg custard, with a grassy finish. I’d expected bitterness, and was happily wrong. It wasn’t just the flavor, though. There was something opulent in the wrongness of the Oleato™ Golden Foam,™ like it was designed to be licked off the drink’s plastic sippy-cup lid. The emulsion felt a little glamorous and very gauche, like indulging in the haute bistro culture of the late 90s—coincidentally, Starbucks’ cultural heyday—all marble and linguine with clams and massive pepper grinders. It was obviously bad for me in small and thrilling ways. It had the mouthfeel of shoplifting.
The cold brew itself was disappointingly mundane. It was too light and too sweet—verging on watery—and beneath the sweetness lurked an acrid bitterness. I thought of heady floral arrangements at a funeral parlor. There was remarkably little aftertaste. My lips felt hydrated, like I put Vaseline on them, which I guess I kind of did.
About a third of the way into the Oleato™ Golden Foam™ Cold Brew, my vision cleared. The world seemed to snap into focus the way it does when you’re having an incredible conversation with someone you just met, or when you’re consuming 19 grams of sugar dissolved into cold brew coffee. I wrote in my tasting notes, “I think that the secret of a small upper isn’t that it makes you better, but that it makes you think you’re better. It quiets your mind because you’re moving too fast to doubt yourself, like how roller skating is actually easier when you’re going fast. My fingers are flitting across the keyboard like hummingbirds at a flower bed.”
I finished my Oleato™ Golden Foam™ Cold Brew. The more I drank, the oilier it tasted. I updated my whiteboard calendar, drawing little daisies along the sides in dry-erase marker. I wandered from room to room in my apartment looking for a glasses cleaning cloth. I ground my teeth. I marched four Ikea bags of laundry to our building’s laundry room, and then marched the clothes back warm and dry and spilled them onto the bed and then cried for ten minutes thinking of how impossible it would be to ever fold them all.
And then, the tummy ache.
My brother and I have this saying, “Too much birthday.” I think it’s from one of those Frances the Badger books—it’s Frances’ birthday, and as her special day wears on, she becomes overstimulated and out of control and eventually spits on her own birthday cake. “Too much birthday” is the 4am feeling; the drunk-but-already-hungover feeling; the loneliness of getting what you want and realizing you never wanted it, but you only feel purpose when you want something.
In many ways, the Starbucks Oleato™ is a beverage of our time. In 2021, I wrote that the Starbucks Pistachio Latte tasted like “a repost of a flavor,” fitting for the ketamine-infused, dissociative emptiness of the pandemic. In the last few years, that doom hasn’t abated, exactly; rather, the pendulum has swung to a sort of baroque nihilism that leans into a facile and ironic celebration of what life we have left. Pearls are back, espresso martinis are back, sleaze is back, giant fucking pepper grinders are back, baby.
The official Starbucks origin story claims that Schultz was struck with epiphany after an early 1980s trip to Milan turned him onto a novel kind of coffee culture: “The baristas were artists, respected for their craft. And the bars themselves served as a ‘third place’ for customers—welcoming, energetic gathering spaces between home and work that became part of people’s daily routine.” The Starbucks Oleato™ itself is marketed as a “revolutionary new coffee ritual.” Unhingedness of a ritualistic drive-thru experience aside, for all the talk of “baristas respected for their craft,” Schultz has spent the last few years waging an aggressive public battle against Starbucks employee unions; leisure, it seems, stops at the customer.
Perhaps I do not have the fortitude for the Starbucks Oleato™, emotionally or gastrointestinally, but the most disturbing thing about my Starbucks Oleato™ experience was that it wasn’t unpleasant. Propelled by the specter of anxiety and illness, I had a normal afternoon. The drink fulfilled its purpose as a film of warmth, Tuscan sunshine, and comfort over one of the most globalized and generic institutions in the world, not unlike the unctuous film that coated my tongue for hours. If you’re looking for a combination cleanse-manic episode with a grassy finish, I recommend the Starbucks Oleato™ Golden Foam™ Cold Brew.
What an exquisite review. I hope the experience was worth any resulting gastrointestinal distress.