Food How many Costa Coffee shops are there in Liverpool? Trying to use the store locator on their website doesn't help. It seems designed to somehow hide their ubiquity by only allowing the user to see whatever is in the particular area of a map when a button is pressed. A quick guestimate is about fifteen in the city centre alone rising up for thirty or so if you include the surrounding areas and that doesn't include all of the other outlets, supermarkets and the like hosting a Costa Coffee self service machine. There are three in the Penny Lane/Allerton Road area (which is where I bought todays sandwich alone).
Which is disappointing because their coffee is dreadful. Actually perhaps I should qualify that. There hasn't been a Costa Coffee I've visited yet which has been able to serve me a decaf coffee which hasn't amounted to being hot, brown water without any flavour, even when I've asked for an extra shot or a smaller cup. I've never been able understand why this is and the shops are always full so clearly their caffeinated blends are to everyone else's taste (or their just not as picky). Mum loved their cappuccinos and we have family friends who go often enough that the staff are already preparing their order as they enter the premises.
Other coffee chains and independents are available and arguably if you're visiting somewhere like this just for the drink you either, like me, don't have any friends or social life and just need somewhere with different walls to look at or have a coffee review blog. But as I am in present condition unable to drink caffeine at all when there isn't anywhere else to go hide from the outside cold and any of the other warm beverages on the menu would blow my calorie allowance for the day, it just really sucks when I order a decaf, hoping against hope that it'll be ok this time then realising pretty quickly that I might as well be drinking warm water.
All of which said, this sandwich was pretty nice. You'll notice I forgot to take a photograph before mastication, but I'm sure you can imagine what it would have looked like within the empty packaging pictured above, thin layers of turkey and bacon framed with stuffing and cranberry sauce against the bread. Ripping the box open reveals the usual scent of sage and onion and biting into it, a nice moist texture, albeit with slightly harder chunks of poultry. The sandwich lent itself to my preferred method of eating the crusts first and then the middle (not always possible when there's a higher filling to bread to ratio).
One thing which inevitably troubles me is the name. Why is it important for us to know this is a "British" sandwich. It says so up top there and in a little circle with a union jack on the back. Presumably there's a regulation but why be so prominent about it? I'm also not sure it's worth £3.50, although I appreciate these things will mostly be consumed on the premises and there is rent and staff to pay (or not). There's certainly less of it than the sub £3 sandwiches I've tried so far and its not as tasty. Sorry the above is so grumpy, but I've been disappointed by Costa Coffee on enough occasions that I couldn't let this slide.
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