Some have accused Mojo of becom­ing Welling­ton’s answer to Star­bucks, but accord­ing to one blog­ger, maybe they’re more like Hoot­ers. Appar­ent­ly, “All the female staff have their shirts but­toned down to the low­est fea­si­ble but­ton mean­ing that any move­ment will expose a lit­tle more breast than your aver­age cafe.” Is this a new moral low for cof­fee mar­ket­ing? Such a major inci­dent required fear­less inves­tiga­tive report­ing, so a fly was dis­patched to Mojo to find out.

After some thor­ough (but dis­creet and respect­ful, of course) research, I had to con­clude that there’s not much to get excit­ed about. The female staff all had pre­cise­ly one but­ton undone, and while it’s true that their uni­forms had top but­tons that were far low­er than the males’, the results were hard­ly exploita­tive or tit­il­lat­ing. There was per­haps the occa­sion­al glimpse of decol­letage, but no more so than one would com­mon­ly encounter with casu­al cloth­ing in warm weath­er, and cer­tain­ly not enough to get Mark Preb­ble hot under the col­lar. The Masked Barfly is glad that a respect­ed brand has not sunk to sleazy tac­tics, while also being per­haps just a tad dis­ap­point­ed.

Mojo MojitoAnoth­er Mojo branch has tak­en a dif­fer­ent tack when it comes to pro­mot­ing their busi­ness. Mojo Bond St adver­tis­es a spe­cial­i­ty of the house called a “Mojo Moji­to”. This fly con­sid­ers it some­thing of an acquired taste, mix­ing as it does iced espres­so, limes, mint and soda. Cer­tain­ly refresh­ing, while giv­ing one’s wings a bit more buzz, but what’s this? No rum?! That’s not a moji­to where I come from. Per­haps we could con­vince them to add a splash of Havana Club, and then things could be get­ting inter­est­ing.

And in fur­ther cof­fee news, the much-loved but gram­mat­i­cal­ly dubi­ous Peo­ples (sic) Cof­fee is expand­ing from their New­town­ista strong­hold to take on the café barons of Cuba St. Their new out­let will be tucked just off the main drag in Gar­rett St, oppo­site what was once Wino Park and is now Emo Park. After all, gourmets, fab­ric lovers, swarm­ing teens, sauna-goers and gam­blers all need their fix of eth­i­cal caf­feine, too.