The Chai blues

The (relatively) new Loading Zone in the hip and happening De Waterkant area is so quintessentially Cape Town it's painful. The chairs are functional designer chic, the music cutting edge electro and the coffee is said to be better than Eccos (and if you're truly Capetonian you'll know what that means). Naturally the walls are unfinished and the lighting harsh in that industrial/interrogation-room kind of way that is all the rage right now. The top half of the loft-like interior features a range of clothing with jeans that retails for upwards of R2600 and bicycles for an unimaginable amount. That's right, bicycles, because when you're in Cape Town it's all about innovation and being carefully, fashionably different.

I say Cape Town but of course I'm not referring to say, Mitchell's Plein, Bellville or even Sea Point down the road from De Waterkant. This version of Cape Town is all French cafes, bubbling fountains and quaint cobble streets neatly purged of the original Cape Malay population. Instead Germans, models and industry types frequent Indonesian furniture shops, speed about on Vespas and tap away on their apple laptops at painfully pedantic coffee shops. Like Loading Zone.

Because if this little section of the city has given itself over to any form of religion, it is that of fashion. And coffee is seriously fashionable right now. Has it been roasted and ground five minutes before being served? Has the milk been freshly steamed and the beans organically grown? If not you're liable to be excommunicated from this church. Drinking bad coffee is tantamount to blasphemy and not drinking coffee at all will leave you in my position. A renegade, misfit and social pariah- adrift in a sea of baristas and constantly in search of just One. Good. Cup of Chai. Yes, tea- that particular poison considered so distasteful by the High Priests of Coffee (i.e. Vida e Café) they've actually barred it from their stores.

Ecco, also in Hudson street, has taken a more conciliatory stance and I'm told they are in the process of constructing a soothing tea garden to co-exist peacefully next to the current interrogation room where Coffee is worshipped. They even have a shelf full of dazzling varieties of teas from all over the world and a laminated venue listing their flavours and origin. Black vanilla leaves from China along with more creative herb varieties from South America have all made their way here. Everything except the simple Chai: that loveliest of lovely Indian brews that has finally, in recent years, found its way across the rest of the civilised world along with lamb vindaloo, chicken korma and samoosas.

Except here. This tiny, pretentious officious nook of the world that consistently and infuriatingly refuses to serve Chai. And now you divine the real root of my displeasure. Let them have their bright yellow seamless chairs, their concrete walls and the hiss and gurgle of their milk steamers. Just let me have my Chai!! Is it too much to ask? Can Ecco really have an imported range of more than 50 teas and no Chai? "I think we had it once," the waiter says squinting at the evidently painful memory.

Both Ecco and Loading Zone offer me Rooibos Chai. Now you'd think one religious fanatic would recognise another. ROOIBOS CHAI??? COULD THERE BE A MORE HEINOUS OFFENCE??!

You must forgive my outburst. As I write I am miserably, but out of pure necessity, sipping at a lukewarm cup of this drivel. The tea bag (ha! As if Chai could be found in a bag) is all drawn out and it's still the weakest most insipid little trumpet that ever did masquerade as her real mistress.

She is but a poor, poor substitute. But it is what I am reduced to.

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*Update: according to a friend Ecco has started serving Chai. Obviously my wailing and gnashing of teeth when I was last there made a lasting impression.