Baladi Coffee
Out of the four coffee shops that I’ve compiled for this project, Baladi Coffee is the only place I had never heard of previously. It came up online after searching “coffee shops in Athens” (clearly there’s some real fancy detective work going on behind the scenes here), and it was actually recommended to me by a classmate. Baladi’s website claims their menu is “a celebration of our Palestinian and Egyptian culture,” so I was excited to try new flavors that I hadn’t before.
On Saturday, April 25, my roommate, Rian, and I drive downtown to park and head to the coffee shop. Rian has been the hardest of my friends to pin down for a date, due to our both equally busy and often conflicting schedules. So, some time to sit down with chai and catch up is very appreciated.
The day that we decided to go also happened to be the day of the Jason Aldean and Luke Bryant concert in Sanford Stadium. Which meant that all of the UGA lots normally open on the weekend were closed, and so were the parking spots in front of the coffee shop. We had to drive around for a while before eventually finding a metered spot a few blocks away. Curse you, country music.
That being said, the long walk to Baladi was pleasant. Rian forced herself to stop talking in the middle of an interesting story so she could “save all the good stuff for the coffee shop,” which I appreciated (although what she ended up telling me I definitely can’t repeat on the Internet).
Baladi, true to their website’s description, has a modern Arabian feel. The white walls feature beautifully ornate black and gold metal work, but the white tile and uniquely shaped black couches makes the space feel like the lobby of a random tech company. Rian notes this as well.
“It’s giving corporate office turned into a coffee shop,” she whispers to me.
She’s whispering because there’s no music playing, and every sound instantly echoes across the hard surfaces. The shop is by no means empty, there are plenty of people doing work on their computers or studying. But no one is talking, which is troublesome for a project partially about conversation.
I order a cup of the Masala Chai, which can also be ordered in an entire teapot to share. Given this information, I’m assuming that the chai here is more of a typical tea than a chai latte. I like tea, but not nearly as much as coffee. The menu also specifies that this drink is “slightly spicy,” so I’m a little intimidated. I haven’t eaten anything for breakfast, so I also order a “Biscoff Cup” from the case next to the register. I can’t tell if it’s made of pudding, cream, or yogurt, but it looks good. I wanted to try the Biscoff coffee, and since I couldn’t get that, I felt like this was the next best bet.
Rian orders an iced vanilla date oat milk latte, which apparently is the Baladi signature coffee. We sit down at an open table in the corner, and soon our drinks are brought out.
The chai comes hot in a nondescript black coffee cup. I take a sip before I open the lid, and I find that this drink is a lot more like a latte than I thought it would be. It’s creamy like a latte, not like tea. The spice is very prominent, and it coats the back of my throat, but the flavor is very good. Like I’ve said many times in this project, I’m not really able to pick out any particular spices, but it’s well balanced and not so spicy that it’s hard to drink. It’s probably the best spiced drink I’ve had so far. There’s also a sweetness in the drink underneath the spice that rounds out the overall flavor and makes a very pleasant drinking experience.
I wish I had taken the lid off the chai before I started drinking it, because I find some latte art underneath that’s already begun to dissipate. Still, the fact that the baristas made the effort, even though you can’t see it under the black lid, is appreciated.
Rian is also enjoying her vanilla date latte. She gives it a solid 4 out of 5, calling it “hella creamy,” which I assume is a good thing.
Despite how quiet it is inside the coffee shop, it doesn’t hinder Rian and I’s conversation.
We have this strange quality where we can go for ages without hanging out and then get together like nothing ever happens. We’ve been living together for two years now, so this doesn’t happen often anymore, but much of our friendship has been spent this way.
Rian and I met in seventh grade. She had just moved to our middle school from her old hometown several hours away, and she ended up sitting with me and my other friends at lunch and in our classes. She and I just clicked in a way I had never felt with any other friends.
She was just as weird as I was (the first time I went to her house, we spent the evening listening to the entire Hamilton soundtrack), and got my humor perfectly. There’s inside jokes we made all the way back in middle school that we still quote today, and I’ve never met someone as genuinely fun-loving as her.
But in high school, we hardly had any classes together. I did theater, and Rian did tennis, and we rarely saw each other in school. Still, even the few times every couple of months we got to hang out, it felt like seventh grade all over again. Our senior year, she asked me if I wanted to be her roommate at UGA over Chipotle, and that was that.
Sharing a dorm only made our friendship stronger, and now we live together off campus with our friend Dorothy (see my Sunroof coffee review). We’ve been friends for nearly half of our lives, and somehow we still haven’t gotten sick of each other.
That doesn’t mean that we don’t have a lot to catch up on. We live in the same house, and there’s still some days we don’t see each other at all. So, we spend some time regaling each other with recent stories about class and work. She tells me about spilling soy sauce on her shirt before an eight hour serving shift, and I tell her about recent encounters with people we know from high school on campus.
She also shows me these weird AI generated videos of Twilight characters punching each other, which I really have no words for. She seems to think they’re hilarious, considering she can’t stop laughing for a solid five minutes.
A lot of our conversation is spent reminiscing. When you’ve been friends for nearly 9 years, there’s a lot of material there. Many of my most treasured memories are with Rian, many of them occurring in my most formative years. I owe a lot of who I am to her. She’s seen pretty much every phase of me (even the emo phase, bless her heart), and has stuck with me through it all. It’s a great feeling to be known so well, and I’m so grateful I’ve had her in my life for this long.
We sit and chat for about an hour before it’s time to head out. But it’s not really goodbye. We have plans to go to campus after this and get some work done before playing pickleball with Dorothy later in the afternoon. Now that we live together, Rian’s a constant presence in my life now.
But even after college, when we inevitably have to go our separate ways, I know we’ll always be a part of each other’s lives. Just like we’ve been since the day we met.
