Amid the general desecration of all that is good about Chicago under the current Woke incompetent leadership of the clueless and déclassé Mayor Brandon Johnson, there remain a few standouts of excellence. One is the Starbucks on North Michigan Avenue. At 35,000 square feet, it’s the world's largest. It’s called Starbucks Reserve Roastery. And it makes you wonder, perhaps naively, why all Starbucks are not this inviting.
The five-story Reserve Roastery does not merely sell coffee; it stages coffee as spectacle, ritual, and theater. Bronze curves sweep upward, glass glows with a honeyed warmth, and the great cask that carries roasted beans between floors turns slowly like an industrial reliquary, reminding visitors that even in a digital age, craft still has weight and gravity.
Step inside, and the soundscape shifts from traffic to a murmur: milk steaming, grinders humming, conversation softening into the hush of shared indulgence, including craft liquor on the 4th floor. The building invites wandering. You ascend not only by staircase but by curiosity, drawn upward through aromas of caramel, citrus, and dark chocolate until the city itself reappears on the rooftop terrace—Chicago stretched wide, Lake Michigan a sheet of pale metal beyond the skyline.
What makes the place memorable is not scale alone, though scale is everywhere. It is the feeling that commerce has briefly yielded to ceremony. People linger longer than they intend. Meetings drift into reverie. Tourists who expected a quick photograph find themselves seated with a drink they did not know existed, watching afternoon light settle across polished wood. In a corridor of Chicago famous for consumption, the Roastery offers something rarer: permission to pause, to savor, to believe—if only for the length of a cup—that ordinary rituals can still be made grand, that the city itself can be elevated again from the ugly stupor of Johnson, Lightfoot, and their arrogant, racialist ilk.
Opened on November 15, 2019, from a repurposed Crate and Barrel, The Reserve Roastery predates Brian Niccol’s short but impactful tenure as Starbucks CEO. The locations of the Reserve Roasteries suggest a who’s who of major cities, including Milan, New York, Seattle, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Despite its precipitous fall in status, Chicago still sees itself as world-historical. And maybe that is something to ponder over a gourmet dessert and a fine cocktail at the greatest Starbucks in the world.
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