Coffee in Paris

I grew up with coffee. The first thing in the morning my grandmother did was to put the kettle on the stove to boil water to prepare coffee. This were the days before the electric coffeemaker and the coffee was brewed with a paper filter. Once brewed it was transferred to a big thermos who had his place in the middle of the table. All day long.

My memories on that coffee are not that good. In fact you could hardly call it coffee, more hot colored water with a slightly taste that reminds you on coffee. But nobody could convince my grandmother to use or more coffee in her filter or to use less water.

Somewhere when I was 10 or 12 years old my father bought a, for those days, very modern thing: an electric percolator and at least we had ‘real’ coffee. But the thermos stayed on the table as my grandmother still brewed ‘her’ coffee with her filter!

Coffee in Paris is surely not brewed the way my grandmother did.

‘Le café’, the drink, is an institution, a cultural phenomenon. Parisians, and the French in general, love coffee having a consumption per capita of 5,2 kilo per year. When you translate this to the number of espresso (7 grams of coffee for an espresso) you arrive at 738 cups of espresso per year!

I had my first real French coffee experience longtime before we were living in St Cloud. My love for the French coffee, strong and bitter, started on our honeymoon when we did a ten day road trip in France. But that is for another story!

As said, coffee is an institution but that is the ‘café’ also. Very famous cafes, such as Café de Flore in the Montmartre district, opened in 1860 and is still one of the most visited places in Paris. Those cafes were the places where artists, writers, scholars and philosophers like Picasso, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre met over coffee.

Today, those famous cafes are no longer the meeting place for the Parisians, artists and writers because the famous cafes are expensive. Their clients now are mostly tourists whom don’t care to pay 4,60 euro for sipping a coffee at a small table on the sidewalk terrace. In a simple café you pay around 1,50 to 2 euros for a coffee.

About coffee in Paris now. In a café you have to know what you want to order. Menus are rare when it comes to coffee choices but you won’t have the burden to choose out of thousand options as in Starbucks.

When you ask the waiter for ‘un café’ (a coffee) you a small cup with a strong and bitter espresso. At the side just a few sugars, no creamer. This never was a punishment for me, I like my coffee like that and I never add any sugar. The real thing.

At breakfast a lot of Parisians opt for a ’café crème’, an espresso in a bigger cup with hot steamed milk and foam served with a few sugars at the side.  The cousin of the ‘café crème’ is the ‘café au lait’, coffee with milk, the breakfast drink for those who have breakfast at their kitchen table. Brewed coffee (or Nescafe instant coffee) with milk and sugar drank out of a bowl or larger cup.

Next to ‘un café’ and ‘un cafe crème’ you can order a ‘café allonge’, an espresso diluted with extra water to make it less strong or a ‘café noisette’, an espresso with a touch of hot milk. Called noisette (nutty) because of the hazelnut color the coffee gets when the hint of milk is added.

When are Parisian having their coffee? Simple. Always. All day long! The time I worked in Paris there was no coffee machine in the office. That was the reason that I went, alone or with a colleague having a coffee at the counter of La Barbusse, the café/restaurant across the street. Took maximum 10 minutes and was a welcome break after meetings or while studying credit risk. 

This coffee break around 10.30 was also the perfect moment to check out the Plat du Jour (dish of the day) what would be available for lunch. And when it was steak frites, you better reserved yours or perhaps it was sold out when you arrived around 12.30!

And in the afternoon it was mostly the same scenario if I didn’t had a meeting with clients outside the office.

We always had our coffee standing at the counter. And Le Barbusse was one of those café’s where they had still a real zinc counter as in the brasseries/cafes in the past.

In France, and surely in Paris, it is common that you pay more for your coffee when you are served at a table or at the sidewalk terrace. In some cases the price can be 60-70% higher than what you pay at the counter. 

But I have to be honest that my wife and I spend hours sipping coffee at a small table on the sidewalk terrace watching people, a bit judging them and imagine stories about them.

The last time I was in Paris was in 2010 and I was gazed. Starbucks and lookalikes everywhere! And people walking around while sipping their latte and caramel macchiato. Unseen before!

Nowadays I read articles trying to convince me that the specialty coffees and mixed coffee drinks with if you want low fat milk, half the sugar as usual and a hint of I don’t know what different tastes you can add, at least reached Paris and will save the coffee culture!

But I am convinced that the Parisian still will drink his ‘cafe noir’ standing at the counter of his/her favorite café and will never end his meal with a latte!

Enjoy your coffee!

Watching people while sipping your coffee: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-tY7ZgWlkI