Las Vegas Weekly

Original is still best

Coffee offered by a redheaded clown in a yellow jumpsuit should be extremely confident. Indeed, McDonald’s coffee used to make the waifiest of us feel like longshoremen. It was stout and scalding and came in a McD cup that made you want to warm your hands on it to prepare for a long day of shoveling fish or manning the big rigs. Enter McCafé’s slight, super-sweet coffee-flavored beverages, which are being peddled with accent marks (Sip it in your cubiclé! After a trip to Targét! Wearing a sweater vesté!), and behold the end of the blue-collar, workaday eye-opener that made us bearable as a species. I tried a variety: vanilla cappuccino (syrupy sweet and watery), hazelnut latte (syrupy sweet and watery) and mocha (somehow less sweet but still watery). They were shy and over-coiffed. They were faint imitations of Starbucks, which is a hell of a thing to say. Fortunately, you still have options. A small cup of original McDonald’s coffee is still $1.71 plus tax. Back to basics.