Premium mediocre is a superb expression of something that is fundamentally meh.
Seven sun filled days on the beach … at Blackpool
Staying the right way up during a whitewater run … down a Grade 1 rapid … in an inflatable raft
A delicious … hamburger
A Bic biro that still has the pocket clip
Climbing the highest mountain … in Australia
A platinum album … of religious music
An Effie Award
A coffee at the perfect temperature … from Starbucks
Being right up front in the moshpit … at a Nickleback concert
Getting a trophy … for “most improved”
Cupcakes are delicious. Give me a box of cupcake mix, or a good recipe, and they’re great.
Cupcakes as a thing, as in the vast majority of cupcake shops out there in recent years, are premium mediocre. They’re more expensive, usually dry with overly sugary icing, pretty but not actually tasty. (Note: I thought Crumb’s were actually good, myself).
There’s a whole section in the article about how actually good things can still be premium mediocre.
This term is meant to be…subtly different, in that it isn’t about people choosing based on their tastes within their budgets.It’s about self-consciously choosing more expensive products that you yourself believe are worse in order to put on a show and convince others you are doing well. The OP goes to a lot of trouble to distinguish “premium mediocre” from “middle-class fancy” (Cheesecake Factory over Olive Garden) and “aristocratic shabby” (a Lexus instead of a Mercedes). The OP is well aware that class differences are not novel.
@anon61833566 I also don’t like Applebee’s and Olive Garden for similar reasons. Unfortunately, most other restaurants are also overpriced and terrible, no matter how good their reviews, how interesting their menu looks, etc. Finding good food is easy, but finding a place where I can actually go and sit down and have a meal that doesn’t taste like the chef was trying to hard to be creative instead of trying to make food taste good is very difficult. Most of the time if I’m going out I’d rather go somewhere reliable (Bertucci’s, Cheesecake Factory, Chili’s) than try some highly recommended local joint that’s almost guaranteed to suck.
I think the problem (for non-USians) is that as nungesser points out, we don’t really eat pumpkin as a sweet unless we’re trying to do some sort of US-holiday themed event, like Halloween or Thanksgiving.
Therefore you know what ‘pumpkin spice something or other’ means, we don’t - and have no reason to.
All we know is that its something weird and ungodly involving pumpkins somehow.
It doesn’t help that because USians know that pumpkins as a sweet have to be given a halfway palatable flavour by putting in spices (and have a traditional set of spices for the purpose), many product names and recipes don’t bother specifying ‘pumpkin spice’ but often say things like ‘pumpkin flavoured’ or just ‘pumpkin’ and assume you know about the spices.
For example, lots of recipes call for canned pumpkin or pumpkin mix. To a non-USian these are meaningless words which on their own just indicate some sort of mashed pumpkin mass.
Oh man, fake handwriting printed on a line is definitely premium mediocre.
Also premium mediocre? The $500/day Zendesk training at a fancy office building in midtown Manhattan where I, coincidentally, first had this form of yogurt…as well as a buffet of dry tiny deli sandwiches served on a wooden cutting board, and individually wrapped Swedish Fish in a glass urn. And the Zendesk-branded moleskine-esque notebooks for note taking, and overly-soft branded tee-shirts.
The whole ‘pumpkin spice flavored’ trend is fairly new. But Americans have been eating sweet pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving (and Christmas, to a lesser extent) since the 19th century, and it’s very much a US centered tradition. So pretty much all Americans know that familiar blend of pumpkin pie spice (cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger, allspice, clove) and associate it with autumn, cool temperatures, colorful leaves, and all the other things we love about fall. So it’s a nostalgic spice blend. Add some orange food coloring and you have “pumpkin (pie) flavor”, something to look forward to after the sweltering days of summer.
That’s all it is, just pureed pumpkin in a can. A nice timesaver but I like to roast the seeds as well.
What’s interesting to me is that Americans will happily eat roasted butternut squash or other similar orange/yellow squashes, but if you give someone roasted, savory pumpkin, it’s some kind of crazy novelty, because everyone’s used to thinking of pumpkin as a pie filling. I ate the heck out of roasted pumpkin on pizza, sandwiches, salads, etc in AUS.
I recall a long and heated debate here on BB about this either last year or the year before…“canned pumpkin isn’t pumpkin” or something to that effect.
The net of the discussion was that canned pumpkin is not in fact the type of pumpkin pictured on the labels (sugar pumpkins) and was instead a variant pumpkin which is technically a squash…which all pumpkins are actually squashes. as I recall.
Pumpkin Spice is to your point a newer thing. Personally I am a fan of it. I do not see it as anything fancier than nor lesser than any other flavored syrup we use in drinks. I’d rather have a shot of that stuff in my ice coffee to flavor it than have a chunk of pumpkin and a scoop of pumpkin guts floating in my cup. Maybe that’s just me.
Around this time of year (autumn), pumpkin beers/ciders start popping up as well, and last year I saw some drink-snob article about all the fakey crappy flavors in fall beers and how such-and-such cider was premium and used real pumpkin for authentic flavors. I tried it. I’d drink a thousand pumpkin-spice flavored ciders and beers before ever again drinking one that tastes like actual mashed squash.
I made a pumpkin ale one year. I mashed and roasted the pumpkin and seasoned it and it smelled heavenly when I made the wort.
Then the entire batch was contaminated when I bottled it all and it was ruined.
I vowed never to put that much effort into it again, because it really wasn’t worth it.
Its sort of like when I cook say a steak…so many people will talk about rubs and seasons, aging, brining, steak sauces, etc etc…just give me a good strip steak seasoned well with salt and pepper and a high heat grill. simple, clean, happy.
