The Morning After, We Recognised Each Other's Café Reviews

I recognised the phrase beautifully balanced acidity before I recognised the username.

The morning had been going well. Priya was making coffee in my kitchen. We were both thirty-nine, both pleasantly surprised by how comfortable the previous evening had felt, and both trying to establish whether breakfast together meant breakfast or an immediate review of our life plans.

I solved that by asking whether she wanted eggs.

'Sure,' she said. 'But not if you're planning to defend that café on Edward Street.'

I turned from the fridge.

'Which café?'

'The one everybody keeps insisting has perfect hollandaise.'

Now, Brisbane has many cafés and many sauces. I could have asked a neutral follow-up. Instead I said, 'It does have beautifully balanced acidity.'

Priya stopped spooning coffee into the filter.

There are silences full of desire. This was a silence full of internet history.

'What's your review name?' she asked.

I considered saying I didn't leave reviews. Unfortunately, we'd spent part of the previous evening discussing honesty, and it seemed early to abandon the theme over breakfast condiments.

'LocalFork.'

Priya put down the spoon. Very carefully.

'You're LocalFork.'

'You're not BrunchEvidence.'

She folded her arms.

Oh, terrific.

For four months I had maintained a polite but persistent online disagreement with BrunchEvidence about a café we both visited. It wasn't a daily occupation. I had a job, friends and a functioning sense of proportion in other areas. But every few weeks one of us would update a review or add a reply, and the other would return to the discussion as though summoned by a tiny bell.

I considered BrunchEvidence rigid. BrunchEvidence considered me easily impressed. We had never used those words, preferring phrases such as perhaps your expectations differ and an interesting interpretation of consistency.

My first encounter with BrunchEvidence had occurred on a Tuesday while I waited for a document to download. I had written my café review the previous weekend and forgotten it until the notification arrived.

Her reply was perfectly civil. That made it easier to believe my own response was necessary. She questioned whether one good visit established consistency. I explained that I'd been several times. She asked whether the dish had changed. I answered a different question at considerable length.

The document finished downloading. I left it unopened while adjusting a sentence about service conditions.

A fortnight later she updated her review. I noticed because I had gone back to check whether my reply sounded reasonable. It did, in my own opinion, which was conveniently available for consultation at all hours.

We developed a pattern. She supplied an observation. I supplied a qualification. She explained why the qualification didn't address her observation. We never swore or became openly insulting, which allowed both of us to believe we were conducting a useful public exchange rather than spending our evenings arguing about breakfast.

Once my sister caught me smiling at my phone and asked whether I'd met someone.

'No,' I said. 'A person on the internet is being wrong in a very specific way.'

She looked disappointed. 'That's less promising.'

I had to admit it was.

The last exchange before meeting Priya had involved the phrase repeatable standards. I remembered it because I'd changed repeatable to consistent, then back again. Somewhere in the world, a café continued making actual food while I considered whether my adjective conveyed the right degree of patient authority.

Now BrunchEvidence was standing barefoot in my kitchen, holding my coffee spoon, and patient authority was proving difficult to assemble. She was much warmer, funnier and more attractive than the stern imaginary person I'd constructed behind the username. This seemed unfair to the imaginary person, who had put in months of unpaid work making me feel correct.

'You said my assessment lacked context,' Priya said.

'You said my enthusiasm was doing the work of analysis.'

'It was a good sentence.'

'It was annoying enough that I remember it.'

We stared at each other. Then Priya began laughing. I joined her, partly because the alternative was defending my online sauce scholarship while wearing yesterday's socks.

'I thought you were a retired man with a notebook,' she said.

'I thought you were someone who asked to speak to the manager about water temperature.'

'I ask politely.'

'I don't own a notebook for food.'

'Interesting qualification.'

The coffee finished. We took our cups to the table. Priya asked where I kept the sugar, then said she hoped its sweetness had been independently assessed. I told her the review period was still open. The eggs remained uncooked while we established the extent of our shared embarrassment.

Priya remembered my first review. I had described the hollandaise as light, bright and worth returning for. She had replied that hers was heavy and oddly sweet. I'd suggested an unusual service day. She'd returned the following week, encountered the same thing and reported back with the energy of a person who now had a reason to collect evidence.

'I went back because of you,' she said.

'You ordered a second breakfast to prove me wrong?'

'I was going to eat somewhere.'

This was a fair point, though it didn't fully explain the paragraph she'd written afterwards.

Before we reached for the phones, Priya asked whether I'd ever suspected we might be describing different visits.

'Of course,' I said. 'That was the point I made about consistency.'

'You made several points about consistency.'

'It's an important quality.'

'Apparently also a hobby.'

She sat back, holding her coffee with both hands. I realised she was deciding whether the conversation was still funny or becoming the online argument with better lighting. I didn't want the second option.

'I may have been a bit invested,' I said.

'A bit?'

'I revised one reply.'

'How many times?'

I looked at the eggs on the bench. They offered no assistance.

Priya admitted she had asked a colleague to read one of her own replies before posting it. The colleague had said it was clear, then asked whether she was writing a complaint to the council.

'And did that give you pause?' I asked.

'Briefly. I removed a semicolon.'

That made me laugh. She smiled, and the morning relaxed again.

We agreed that neither of us should be permitted to quote the other's entire review from memory. It was a sensible boundary and immediately difficult to observe. Priya began a sentence with to be fair, and I recognised it as the beginning of her third reply.

'You're doing it,' I said.

'So are you. You knew where I was going.'

There was no dignified escape from being mutually familiar with a discussion we both claimed had occupied very little of our attention. We might as well establish the facts properly for once. Priya moved the coffee away from the phones, and I cleared a patch of table as though we were about to examine evidence more consequential than two plates of eggs.

I retrieved my phone. She retrieved hers. We opened the café menu, each prepared to show the other exactly what we meant.

I pointed to the smoked salmon eggs with lemon hollandaise.

Priya pointed to the pulled mushroom breakfast with brown-butter hollandaise and a sweet relish.

We looked at the screen.

Then at each other.

'You were eating that?' I asked.

'You weren't?'

The argument, which had accumulated several hundred words and a modest amount of personal resentment, had been conducted over two different dishes.

The menu had abbreviated both sauces to hollandaise in the little summary beneath the photographs. We'd each expanded the same word into a full understanding of the other's plate without asking the elementary question of what was on it.

'I mentioned salmon,' I said.

'In a different review.'

She was right. I checked. Somewhere between my actual breakfast and my detailed opinion, I had omitted the thing I'd been eating.

Priya read her own review again. She had described mushrooms but never identified the brown-butter version. We had supplied each other's missing facts with remarkable confidence.

For a minute we each tried to rescue a small part of our position. I pointed out that my description of my breakfast had been accurate. Priya said hers had too. That left us with two accurate accounts and an entirely unnecessary disagreement built between them.

She scrolled to the earliest exchange and read it silently. I watched her expression change.

'You did ask whether I'd tried the other option,' she said.

'I did?'

'Yes. I thought you meant a different café.'

I found the reply. She had answered that she preferred to judge a place on its own merits. At the time I had considered that spectacularly evasive. Now I could see the gap we'd both stepped around while continuing to build the argument.

'I thought you were refusing to answer,' I said.

'I thought you were moving the conversation.'

We put the phones face down at the same time. The movement was so coordinated that we laughed again.

Priya reached for her coffee. 'I am relieved you're not a retired man with a notebook.'

'I'm relieved you don't routinely interrogate waiters about water.'

'Only when there is a genuine issue.'

I looked at her. She smiled over the rim of the cup. The actual person was proving much more interesting than the opponent, and considerably easier to want another breakfast with.

'Well,' she said. 'We're both unbearable.'

'Only before clarification.'

I went back to the kitchen and cooked the eggs. Scrambled. No sauce. There were limits to how much hollandaise the morning could accommodate.

Over toast, Priya told me she worked in logistics. This explained several qualities I had already admired and one I was newly afraid of. I told her I edited training materials, which explained why I'd treated a brunch disagreement as something requiring a carefully revised response.

We were not mysterious strangers revealed as villains. We were two ordinary people who had made each other less ordinary in our heads because a username left so much space to decorate.

'I liked you better last night,' she said.

'I didn't mention acidity once.'

'You did talk about a good lime.'

'We were discussing tacos. It was relevant.'

She reached across the table and took the last piece of toast from my plate. I allowed it, a generous gesture given the state of international relations.

Before she left, we updated our reviews separately. Mine clarified the dish. Hers did too. Neither mentioned the date. The café had suffered enough involvement in our personal lives without being assigned a romantic subplot.

Then Priya wrote a private message to me, although she was still standing in my hallway.

Would you like to conduct a joint inspection next Saturday?

I looked up. 'Of the café?'

'Of breakfast. Same plate this time.'

I said yes. She kissed me, smiled and left.

I spent a moment looking at the closed door. Then I opened her contact details and changed her name from Priya to Priya, Actual Person.

Under notes I added: Ask what she ordered.

It seemed a useful principle with applications beyond sauce.