Paris coffee shops give drinkers caffeine high
PARIS: “People would walk in and be, like, ‘ What are you?’ “David Flynn recalls of the early days after he opened a coffee shop called Télescope in Paris. “Vous êtes quoi exactement?”
Four years ago, customers were confused not just by the spare decor, nothing like a traditional Parisian cafe, but by the concept: A place focused on the coffee, really good coffee, with just a few pastry options on the side.
In fact, the phrase “coffee shop” has yet to get a French translation; the coffee shop’s characteristically high standards for beans, water and the processes for combining the two come so clearly from the English-speaking world.
The fact is, although Paris is famous for its street- side cafes and artisanal food culture, the city generally serves up an unappetising cup of coffee.
“So many of our customers over the years (asked), ‘ Where can we go for coffee?’ “says Paul Barron, a New Zealander who runs a bike tour company here. “And we had a hard time telling them where to go.”
But a movement was afoot. Flynn and Barron are part of a growing artisanal coffee culture in France, inspired abroad but newly infused with a French flavour and direction.
Flynn, an American expat, opened Télescope in 2012. In 2015, Barron and his American business partner started their own coffee shop, Le Peloton. Some two dozen others have opened within the past five years, many, but not all, in the trendy northeast part of the capital. Americans would call this area “hipster.”
The French call it “bobo,” short for “bourgeois and bohemian.”
Many are in the same neighbourhoods targeted in the terrorist cafe shootings in November.
French coffee is typically bitter, says Hippolyte Courty, who runs an importer and roastery, L’Arbre à Café, supplying both his own boutique and a handful of coffee shops and restaurants around the city.
A historian and Frenchman whose previous passion was wine, Courty has studied and written about French coffee culture.
He says the French, who have been drinking coffee since the 1700s, developed a taste for the bitter fl avour of chicory in the early 19th century and later for the harsh-tasting robusta variety of coffee bean imported from the country’s West African colonies.
By the late 20th century, most cafes in the country had contracts with a few large distributors that provided not only the affordable, bitter, lowerquality beans, but also the expensive machines that made espresso, which would otherwise require a significant investment for cafe owners.
Consequently, Courty said, “The quality of the coffee kept falling, and the French, who didn’t pay much attention to coffee, unfortunately, paid even less.”
So, as a coffee scene has fi nally emerged in France, it’s not surprising that a lot of the people involved had roots elsewhere. “You had a speciality coffee culture that had grown significantly in the States and in Australia,” said Anna Brones, an Oregon transplant who, with photographer Jeff Hargrove, has published a book called “Paris Coffee Revolution.” As a result, “a lot of the people that opened up places (in Paris) had either travelled, lived and/or worked in either one of those places.”
An exception is the pioneering Caféothèque, which recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary in a cosy spot facing the Seine: It was founded by a former Guatemalan ambassador.
But at most other establishments, you’re likely to hear English spoken behind the counter, in some combination of British, American or Australian accents. Many of the new generation of artisanal coffee shops share a certain white-walled, wood- and- steel aesthetic some in this city call Nordic and others, more derogatively, “Brooklyn.” A striking number carry copies of the trendy “slow-lifestyle” magazine Kinfolk.
However, while they may offer expats a familiar setting in which to spend quality time with a laptop or book, they have had to adapt their business models. French coffee shops must pay higher wages than in the United States or Australia and do just a fraction of their business in high-volume takeout.
The economic realities can result in things such as the six- euro cup of fi ltered coffee - that’s almost US$ 7 - but most places have instead balanced their budgets by offering more food.
You can get an unusually hearty breakfast (for Paris) at Holybelly, the coffee shop in the trendy Canal SaintMartin neighbourhood that Frenchman Nico Alary founded after training as a barista in Melbourne.
It’s also one of the only spots in town that you’ll fi nd coffee served in a mug.
Next, though, Alary has visions of taking over a classic French cafe – the kind of place where the French will stand at the bar for a morning espresso and sit for hours in the evenings, preferably on sidewalk patios, talking and watching the street life pass by. — WP-Bloomberg