Collectivo Coffee Lincoln Park Is a Local Starbucks

I have a test I run at every new coffee shop. I order a cappuccino or a macchiato. Small drinks, tight proportions, nowhere for a bad shot to hide. Two ounces of espresso, two ounces of milk, two ounces of foam. If it's done right, the milk is smooth, glossy, and warm in the way that is sweet and drinkable, not scalding and acrid. A properly steamed milk should never burn your mouth. It burns your mouth at roughly the same temperature it burns the barista's hands through the metal tin they're holding, which is reason enough to care about getting the temperature right.

There is one red flag that tells me almost everything I need to know before the drink even arrives. If I order a cappuccino and the barista asks me what size I want, I know what I'm about to get. Cappuccinos are not sized. They are proportional. Asking what size reveals that the shop is treating it like a vessel to fill rather than a drink with a specific structure. I'll usually pivot to drip coffee on a macchiato order if the same thing happens, because a macchiato has even less room for error and I'd rather not find out.

At Collectivo, the red flag went up immediately.

What arrived was over-roasted, over-extracted, and too large, with burnt milk that took twenty minutes to cool down enough to drink without risking injury. The baristas were doing their best. That's not the problem. The problem is that they weren't taught correctly, and that comes from the top.

I come from a competition barista background. I know what pride in the cup looks like and I know what speed to the counter looks like. Collectivo is the latter. For people who want something familiar and consistent in the way that a chain is consistent, this works. For people who care about what's actually in the cup, there are better options within walking distance of every single one of these five locations.