Italy Defied Starbucks—Until It Didn’t
“We arrive with humility and respect in the country of coffee,” Howard Schultz, the founder of Starbucks, told Corriere della Sera, Italy’s leading daily, last week. He was about to inaugurate, in Milan, the first Italian outpost of the global chain that supersized coffee and now vies with McDonald’s and Coca Cola as a symbol of American gastronomic imperialism. Even, of course, if Italy has one of the world’s most developed coffee cultures, which in fact is what inspired Schultz to start Starbucks in the first place, in 1983.
Italy is a country where the pumpkin is generally found in the ravioli, not the latte, and so the Milan. (“Eight Ridiculous Things Starbucks Is Saying About Its New Store in Milan.”) The Roastery, the first in Europe after others in Seattle and Shanghai, will offer coffee and food and also illustrate Starbucks’s roasting process.
