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  • Bringing the Buzz Back to the Cafe

    FOOD & DRINK
    NOVEMBER 21, 2009, 8:01 A.M. ET
    Bringing the Buzz Back to the Café

    Once they plotted revolutions, now they're typing blogs.
    Today's cafe society is a weak decaf.


    By MICHAEL IDOV
    The coffeehouse may just be mankind's greatest invention. It certainly
    is the most collective one: In the classic, which is to say Viennese,
    form, the coffeehouse is perhaps the finest collaboration between
    Europe, Asia and Africa. It is almost as if every great civilization
    in the world had taken a brief time-out from trying to kill one
    another to brainstorm what a perfect public space should look
    like. The result was equal parts Athenian agora, Saharan oasis and
    Continental court, with pastries. Modernity in its bloody splendor has
    tumbled out of the coffeehouse: In January of 1913 alone, as Frederic
    Morton describes in his Vienna history "Thunder at Twilight," Lenin,
    Trotsky, Hitler, Freud and Josip Broz Tito were using the same cups at
    Vienna's Café Central. (Stalin was in town, too, but he was too much
    of a country bumpkin for espresso.)

    And yet it seems that we're losing the coffeehouse-less to the usual
    suspects like the Internet and Dunkin' Donuts than to our own
    politeness. We've brought the noise level down to a whisper and are in
    the process of losing even the whisper: Enter the modern café and the
    loudest sound you'll hear will be someone typing, in ALL CAPS, an
    angry blog comment. We've become a nation of coffee sophisticates-to
    the point where McDonald's feels compelled to roll out some semblance
    of an espresso program=80'but we're still rubes when it comes to the
    real purpose of the place: It's not the coffee. It's what your brain
    does on it.


    An astonishing, grandiose second-floor Art Deco space looking out on
    one of Europe's prettiest corners (Alcalá and Gran Via). The crowd is
    often dictated by whatever's taking place in the building's art
    galleries, and leavened by bankers from the nearby Banco de
    España. It used to be a members-only club, and you still have to pay
    a euro to gain entrance.

    Mayak, Moscow
    Ulitsa Bolshaya Nikitskaya 19, in the Mayakovsky Theatre

    The coffee's crap. So is the food. Yet it fulfills the coffeehouse
    mission
    of casually squeezing together creative elites like no other place I
    know.
    On any given evening, editors-in-chief can be found sharing tables
    with film directors, television moguls, permanently depressed
    opposition politicians, at least one resident movie star and the
    occasional Western tourist who
    doesn't recognize any of them.

    A Brasileira, Lisbon
    Rua Garrett, 120, Chiado

    Admittedly a bit too famous for its own good (I may as well be
    recommending Les Deux Magots), and outfitted with silly tourist bait
    like the statue of Fernando Pessoa out front. Yet its intellectual
    pedigree is real, and the room remains largely untouched from the
    1920s.

    Café Sabarsky, New York
    1048 5th Ave.

    A near-perfect café - if only it weren't such a production. Part of
    the Neue Galerie, it is itself a carefully curated museum piece on par
    with any Klimt or Schiele that hangs upstairs. It could use a little
    schmutz - I wish I could magically tow it 70 or 80 blocks south.

    Café Havelka, Vienna
    Dorotheergasse 6, Wien 1010

    In my novel Ground Up, it's called Café Hrabal and has fictional
    owners, but the description still stands: "Compared to most others, it
    looked small and cheap, cut down to more recognizable New York
    proportions in square footage and budget. Perhaps that's what endeared
    it to us most, the faint possibility of such a place back
    home. Instead of occupying a ballroom with 30-foot cathedral windows
    and its own flock of pigeons under the ceiling, the owners managed to
    squeeze the whole thing into a windowless basement and lose none of
    the buzzed bustle: in fact, the cramped quarters only helped
    essentialize it."
    It's telling that the people credited with the invention of the
    coffeehouse tend to be rogues with tangled multinational
    roots. There's George Franz (or Jerzy Franciszek, or Yuri-Frants-his
    very name holds at least three passports) Kolschitzky. A kind of
    Austrian-Polish-Ukrainian-Cossack cross between Paul Revere and Ray
    Kroc, he is said to have slipped out of the Turk-beseiged Vienna in
    1683, disguised in a fez, to call up reinforcements. When invited
    before the emperor to collect his reward, he asked for the sacks of
    "camel fodder" left behind by the retreating enemy, and opened
    Vienna's first café shortly afterward. This whole coffee caper whiffs
    mightily of folklore-it's even reminiscent of one Arabic fable-and
    sure enough, no historical record of it exists. Kolschitzky's
    real-life counterpart, however, is hardly less exotic: an Armenian
    named Johannes Diodato, who's been given a royal monopoly on coffee
    for his services as a spy.
    It's no wonder, then, that the coffeehouse became a hotbed of a
    proudly rootless culture. Psychoanalysis and socialism sprang partly
    from the espresso cup. In 17th-century London, coffeehouses were
    derided, in a fantastic turn of phrase, as "seminaries of sedition."
    By the end of that century, they numbered over 2,000. Poet John Dryden
    held court at Will's; the so-called "Learned Club" gathered at the
    Grecian, where a sword fight once erupted over the correct
    pronunciation of a Greek word; and the London Stock Exchange itself
    began with a newsletter John Castaing distributed in 1698 at
    Jonathan's. A bit later, Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and Samuel
    Johnson-with Boswell in tow, naturally-enjoyed interdisciplinary
    shouting matches with actors and painters at the Turk's Head. And then
    the East India Trading Company buried the kingdom in affordable tea,
    private clubs closed their doors to the rabble, and the age of the
    coffeehouse in the British Isles was over.
    In the late 19th century, the global nexus of café culture returned
    to Vienna for arguably the greatest stretch of coffee-fueled
    creativity known to man. This is when every convention of the modern
    coffeehouse-the many-antlered coat rack, the marble tabletop, the
    day's newspaper spread Torah-like on bamboo holders-fell into place,
    and its role as the intellectual sparring ring was cemented.
    Turn-of-the-century Vienna gave rise to a generation of close-knit
    "Jung Wien" writers, including Arthur Schnitzler and Stefan Zweig,
    most of whom practically lived in cafés. This is not an
    exaggeration. Peter Altenberg had his mail delivered to Café Central.

    The arrangement was hardly idyllic. The Jung Wieners steadily went
    through a limited pool of girlfriends and came to blows with each
    other over reviews. Yet out of the friction came the kind of humanist
    thought that still reverberates throughout literature, design,
    philosophy, even architecture. And once again, a cosmopolitan,
    slightly alienated attitude permeated the room: Most of the writers
    were, after all, Jewish, including Schnitzler.
    It was Vienna's postwar generation that grew tired of what they now
    saw as an irredeemably quaint antebellum lifestyle. In the early
    1950s, dozens of famous coffeehouses-some of them centuries in
    operation-shuttered one by one. The Viennese had a special word for
    this phenomenon, as the Viennese tend to: kaffeehaussterben,
    coffeehouse death. Some placed the blame on the more casual "espresso
    bar," with its new and blasphemous practice of selling coffee to go,
    but many suspected a deeper malaise. Critic Clive James, in his
    collection "Cultural Amnesia," logically blames it on the decimation
    and scattering of the Jewish civil society and the lost art of Jewish
    conversation. An even likelier culprit, I think, is the Germanic
    postwar self-loathing jag. "The truth is that I have always hated the
    Viennese coffeehouse," Austrian novelist Thomas Bernhard wrote in his
    memoir, "because in them I am always confronted with people like
    myself, and naturally I do not wish to be everlastingly confronted
    with people like myself."

    Compared to the passions that roiled London and Vienna, the American
    coffeehouse was always genteel and, dare I say it, elitist; the only
    surviving art genre our café society has birthed is coffeehouse folk
    music=80'sensitive-guy or -gal tunes that fade almost eagerly into the
    background. Sure, we love the idea of the coffeehouse because it
    dovetails with our idea of urbanity in general: That's why a
    coffeehouse is the first harbinger of a gentrifying area, and the last
    stand of a neighborhood in decline. As with a hospital or a bookstore,
    we may not even go there but feel better knowing one is near.
    We've also used it to balkanize ourselves. The Viennese coffeehouse is
    a communal exercise in individuality: As an Austrian friend noted
    recently, his compatriots don't go to cafés to socialize-everyone
    goes to watch everyone else. This phenomenon doesn't quite work in
    America because cafés here tend to draw specific crowds: a hipster
    café, a mom café, a student café. With the exception of the
    ubiquitous Starbucks, where slumming and aspiration meet, we use our
    coffeehouses to separate ourselves into tribes.
    Don't get me wrong-any coffeehouse is better than none at all, and
    their second, post-Starbucks, wave of proliferation is a fantastic
    phenomenon, bringing jobs and the pleasure of good espresso to
    communities across the country. The only trouble with the new, proudly
    bean-centric places that keep popping up is that they tend to be
    austere obsessives. There's barely anything to eat other than a
    perfunctory pastry, and never, ever any alcohol. You're supposed to
    contemplate your coffee, top notes to finish, in worshipful silence, a
    notion as wrongheaded as a caramel frappucchino.

    The coffeehouse experience is inextricably linked with newsprint:
    Coffee and a paper are an even more powerful pair than coffee and a
    cigarette. Early London coffeehouses used to have "runners"-people who
    would go from café to café to announce the latest news; there's just
    something about the intake of data tidbits from many sources that goes
    well with coffee. Same goes for writing in cafés. Hemingway nails it
    down within the very first pages of "A Moveable Feast": the author
    alone with his café au lait, shavings from his pencil curling into
    the saucer, and, of course, a girl with "hair black as a crow's wing
    and cut sharply and diagonally across her cheek" at the next table.
    Which brings us to the laptop. At any given moment, a typical New York
    coffeehouse looks like an especially sedate telemarketing
    center. Recently, there's been a movement afoot to limit the use of
    laptops. The laptoppers hog
    the tables, but they do the coffeehouse experience an even deeper
    disservice. They make it a solitary one, and it's a different kind of
    solitude from the stance sung by Hemingway. You're not just
    alone-you're in another universe entirely, inaccessible to anyone not
    directly behind you.
    Perhaps the economic downturn will untie our tongues and restart the
    conversation. With rents going down, the next Café Abraco or Café
    Regular may be able to afford a larger space and have some money left
    for tables and chairs. And the new Lost Generation of creative
    strivers is already here to fill these chairs. In Los Angeles, friends
    report, where the lavish business lunch is no longer the industry
    standard, the café society is in unexpectedly full swing. Somewhere
    in the caffeinated ether, the ghost of Schnitzler is
    smiling. -Latvian-born Michael Idov is a contributing editor at New
    York Magazine and author of the novel "Ground Up." He lives in
    Brooklyn and will be doing a panel on coffeehouse culture at the
    Austrian Cultural Forum in New York on Dec 4.


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