I would expect even good restaurants to have just okay coffee, not as good as the average cafe, unless we're talking an excellent breakfast place. In the US, people have coffee with breakfast and with dessert. So a dinner restaurant isn't going to serve a lot of cups of coffee -- just to a subset of people who choose to have dessert.
And although good coffee is always welcome, you don't really need a great coffee with dessert, just a decent one. You want something to perk your senses up a bit after the meal and to provide heat and bitterness to balance out the sweet, probably cold dessert. Nobody's going to be focusing on the coffee, just the dessert. And people don't expect to pay more than a few bucks for a cup of coffee, even at a nice place.
So there's really not much profit in stocking great coffee, installing top-of-the-line coffee machines, and training your staff how to make it. Making espresso is relatively time-consuming, too, as is grinding the beans and cleaning everything (working as a barista is like 90% cleaning). So you buy something that sounds impressive enough to list on the menu for as cheap as you can get it, you grind up enough ahead of time to get you through the night, you put it in a big industrial-sized drip machine with an insulated carafe, and you forget about it.
>Nobody's going to be focusing on the coffee, just the dessert.
I think that's actually a common misconception. Maybe it's relevant only in coffee-heavy cultures, but a coffee is (often) the very last thing one will taste before leaving the restaurant. You want your customers to leave on a high note, right? This is why so much effort is spent on the dessert, the final dish. But the coffee will follow the dessert! That's the final dish.
When an otherwise decent meal is followed by a terrible coffee, to me it's depressing; it forces me to re-evaluate the experience. Maybe those dishes weren't as good as I thought, maybe they got them right by accident... This is why many restaurants will actually offer you liquor at the very end; it's an easy way to make you leave happy. If you don't go down that route, then you should invest some time in making sure the coffee is good. Or at least get a Nespresso :)
Well, I'm talking about the US, where I have always had coffee served with dessert, not after it. And of course the coffee should be decent, even pretty good. I'm just saying it doesn't make economic sense to serve great coffee unless you're intending to focus on that as a restaurant.
You're not really supposed to finish your coffee before you finish your dessert. I mean, it's fine to, but the last thing you ingest at a restaurant should be a beverage.
And although good coffee is always welcome, you don't really need a great coffee with dessert, just a decent one. You want something to perk your senses up a bit after the meal and to provide heat and bitterness to balance out the sweet, probably cold dessert. Nobody's going to be focusing on the coffee, just the dessert. And people don't expect to pay more than a few bucks for a cup of coffee, even at a nice place.
So there's really not much profit in stocking great coffee, installing top-of-the-line coffee machines, and training your staff how to make it. Making espresso is relatively time-consuming, too, as is grinding the beans and cleaning everything (working as a barista is like 90% cleaning). So you buy something that sounds impressive enough to list on the menu for as cheap as you can get it, you grind up enough ahead of time to get you through the night, you put it in a big industrial-sized drip machine with an insulated carafe, and you forget about it.