A friend of mine has moved away from coffee-shop-lined Kloof Street, to seemingly coffee-shop-free Kenilworth. And to say that he’s rather distraught about the lack of decent cappuccinos (within walking distance) would be something of an understatement.

You see, he’s somewhat fussy about his coffee (as one must be!), and the watered down ricoffy-like versions he’s been getting in his neck of the woods have been getting him down (I feel his pain).

So, because life’s too short to drink bad coffee (yes, I’m a Seattle fan), I am now attempting to leap into the breach, to find, for him, a place that serves a keener, meaner brew that will wake him up instead of turning his stomach.

I began my search on the net.

Typing in www.buondi.co.za seemed an obvious way to start, but let me warn you that once you have turned that particular corner there is no going back. It redirects to http://nowaynescafe.itgo.com – the ‘No Way Nescafe‘ campaign. Heard of it? Neither had I…

Suffice to say, it’s not quite what I was looking for, but it did tell me a whole lot more about the ‘dark underbelly‘ of the coffee industry than I really needed to know. Coffee farmers “drowning in poverty” while Nestlé is “drowning in profits”. That sort of thing.

Buondi is, of course, a product of Nestlé, hence the connection. I couldn’t quite work out whether they were serious or not, but I suppose they must be.

Undeterred, I then found www.buondicaffe.com, the main website for Buondi, but entirely in Portuguese and therefore not of much use to me. Substituting ‘co.za’ for ‘com’ I hit the jackpot: Buondi Caffe South Africa.

So far so good. I browsed through the history of coffee (the plant originated in Ethiopia, apparently, and still grows wild there), read the ‘Buondi story‘ (am I a ‘Buondi person’, I wondered), and found out about becoming a ‘CoffeeMaster‘ (for those on the quest for the perfect espresso).

I stopped short of downloading their ‘Bold BUONDI Girl Desktop Theme‘.

What I didn’t find was the list of outlets that I’d been hoping for. Stumped! So, I have emailed them to ask whether such a list exists (and, more to the point, whether there happen to be any in and around Kenilworth).

Here’s hoping they get back to me some time soon – I fear for my friend’s mental health.

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