Well, it’s 1:40 am and I’m awake. No real idea why. Could be delayed jetlag, I suppose, though I’ve been back a week and I don’t like the idea of jetlag anyhow. I feel I should be able to hop insouciantly between continents like some some globetrotting gazelle, a citizen of the world not bound by trivialities like time zones. Maybe not. Either way, for something to do, as I sit here in the study listening to a fox making disquieting noises in the street outside, I thought I’d make another list — and this time it’s of some of the best places to sit and have a cup of coffee.
1. Bryant Park, New York
My most recent haunt, and a pretty well-known one. I happened on it as a result of mere hotel-proximity, on my first grown-up visit to the city four years ago, and have sunk many a happy coffee in it since. I don’t know what it is that makes Bryant Park quite so restful. It’s basically just a large square of grass, with beds and paths and trees on three sides and stairs leading up to the rear of the Public Library on the other. It could be the presence of very tall buildings on all sides, which gives something of the quality of a hidden garden. It could also be that, standing bang in the centre of Midtown as it does, it’s the New York park that contrasts most strongly with the streets around it. I have even toyed with wondering whether the fact this block held, for the second half of the nineteenth century, a reservoir, has something to do with it — a large body of water somehow changing the energy field. Though that just sounds like so much new age bollocks, really, not least as throughout 1970s the park was by all accounts an excellent place to score drugs or get cataclysmically mugged, which you might expect to have muddied the energy waters somewhat.
Anyway. There’s lots of places to sit, and a bar in the evenings, and free wifi too, though I can’t always get that to work. This actually makes it even better. I like places where I can’t be in contact with the outside world. They’re increasingly few and far between.
2. Outside Les Deux Magots, Paris
Another non-controversial choice, unless you’re achingly cool. People have been knocking back café crème outside this St Germain hotspot for a long time — it was a popular haunt for Satre and Simone de Beauvoir, not to mention Hemingway and Camus. I tend to wind up spending a good few hours outside the Magots whenever I’m lucky enough to be in Paris, not least because there’s a great bookstore just behind it (the name of which I forget: maybe I’m more tired than I thought). Yes, it’s a tourist trap, but you know what — when I’m in Paris, I’m a tourist. Actually, outside pretty much any Parisian café will do, so if you’re worried about not seeming cutting edge enough, why not hop on the Metro to the outskirts of town and find somewhere there instead. Don’t feel that you have to come back, either.
3. Outside the Seattle’s Best opposite Pike Place Market, Seattle
Especially early in the morning, so you can watch the market swinging properly into life.
4. The Meeting Place, the seafront, Brighton
The fact that the coffee here is actually pretty dire possibly indicates that the quality of the beverage on offer is not of paramount importance. With the sea, gulls, and the teetering remains of the old West Pier to gaze upon, it’s a good place to be. If the weather’s dire (which is far from unknown in Brighton) then outside the Starbucks in the Lanes is a decent second choice. (And don’t give me any crap about Starbucks not being proper coffee. Of course it’s proper coffee, you muppet. It’s not the best coffee in the world — but it’s good enough. Disliking things just because they’re popular does not make you cool. What are you, fourteen? Get a couple of extra shots in your drink like a grown-up, and go peddle your angst elsewhere.)
Hmm. Four isn’t many. I notice that I don’t actually have one for London, for example. Perhaps you need to not be local, for the perfect coffee-sipping experience… Or maybe I just haven’t found it yet. I notice also that all these places are outside. This is partly due to the smoking thing — I like a cigarette with my coffee, and there ain’t nowhere in the civilized world they’ll let you do that any more. But it’s also that I associate coffee with watching the world go by. Tea is for drinking indoors. Tea is self-referential, a medicine. Coffee is for turning outwards and taking in the other: and therefore part of the essence of a classic coffee-drinking spot is it allows you to observe a corner of the universe — without necessarily feeling that, right at this moment, you have to be an active part of it.
Christ, it’s half past two. Better try sleeping again, not least as tomorrow I have a day designing stuff for WHC2010. May your Fridays be golden. And if you’re at a loose end…
5. […]
Suggestions, please.
@ememess
24 comments
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May 29, 2009 at 8:35 pm
Rachel Coldbreath
Good old Patisserie Valerie on Old Compton Street. Decent coffee, but better than that you can watch all of human life slouch / ooze / skip by. An excellent spot for a hung over, wordless lunch with a friend, when you just don’t have enough braincells functioning to allow you to walk, let alone speak.
May 30, 2009 at 9:56 am
ememess
Patisserie Valerie, yes, god thought. Would be even better if there was outside space, though…
May 30, 2009 at 11:24 pm
Rachel Coldbreath
Yeah, it’s seriously lacking in that regard. The pavements should become 20 feet wider in summer.
Hey, I’ve just spotted that you’re doing an adaptation of “Mrs Todd’s Shortcut” for Granada – is that really going ahead? I love that story – read it when I was about 15 and seeing him talk about “folding the map” was probably the first inkling I had that – hey – maybe I wasn’t entirely alone after all.
I can’t wait to see how that turns out!
R.
May 31, 2009 at 9:56 am
ememess
It’s theoretically happening, though stalled. I did a first draft of a script over a year ago, since which not a lot has happened. I love that story, too – always been one of my favorites of his…
May 29, 2009 at 8:41 pm
Nukapai
#5 – Any number of cofee places in Helsinki, Finland. (Only during the summer months, given your need to be outside). There are great old-fashioned places in town, along the boulevards – and my personal favourite due to serious ice cream addiction; the Fazer cafe. Finnish coffee is usually medium-roast, brewed reasonably strong and filtered through a coffee maker. It’s not like getting an espresso (though those are beginning to be available too), but it’s a nice experience.
May 30, 2009 at 9:56 am
ememess
Have never been to Finland. I must remedy this…
May 31, 2009 at 1:30 pm
nautiloid
I always imagined the Finns to be coffee fanatics with well-designed high-power espresso machines. Still, I’d love to go there and try the coffee.
May 29, 2009 at 8:54 pm
C.J. Lines
There are some good coffee shops for people-watching in and around Soho. I am rather fond of the Coffee Republic on Soho Square. If you go around lunchtime, the Square’s usually packed with people so you get a combination of watching frantic urban life with a rare bit of greenery thrown in. The coffee’s not bad either.
May 29, 2009 at 11:09 pm
nautiloid
A little cafe on Plaza Itzimna, Merida, Mexico. A ex-pat guy from the States ran it when I was living there and the beans were awesome. In fact, he may be partly responsible for turning me into something of a coffee nerd and we had long discussions about the best methods to brew… Anyhow, he did a bookswap too and I picked up ‘The Third Policeman’ from him. A great place to sit and meditate on American history. The beautiful little church sits atop a whole heap of Mayan culture – some fragment of the city if Tiho – and it’s one of those places where I really felt that resonance and continuity. I have no idea if the cafe is still there but the square is worth a visit anyhow.
May 30, 2009 at 11:45 am
Carlos
For a mexican living in Ireland a reference to an Irish book while drinking coffee in Mexico makes me want to be there.
I have a couple of other places, outside el restaurant del lago on a sunny spring morning in Mexico City. The world stops there while you drink it!
I also love drinking a cup of coffee (although coffee is not great) on top of the Stephen’s Green shopping centre in Dublin overlooking the green and grafton street. Specially on a rainy afternoon.
May 30, 2009 at 12:26 am
dakegra
there’s a guy who sells coffee out of a little van in St Katharine’s Dock, down by Tower Bridge, and it’s the best espresso I’ve ever tasted. Proper coffee machine with levers and everything. Brilliant.
Worth stopping by if you’re in the area.
May 30, 2009 at 9:36 am
Alex
It wasn’t coffee; it was beer, but it was alone with a beverage with my own thoughts in a place I’ve returned to in my head everyday of the three months since.
I was on a balcony in a place who’s name I’ve forgotten, overlooking Bondi Beach in Sydney, listening to the waves and watching the sunset. I first asked myself the question: ‘why do I live in London?’ for the first time in 11 years. I haven’t answered it yet but I seem to be in the process of leaving my job.
It wasn’t until the next day I realised that the activity that I was watching on the beach at the time was the aftermath of the first shark attack in those waters for 80 years, but the serenity still stands!
May 30, 2009 at 9:55 am
ememess
Yes – the lone beer can be just as good, actually. Remember having a few outside some bar in Amsterdam a few years back. Don’t think there had been a shark attack there, though,
May 30, 2009 at 9:49 am
Julian Simpson
I’d add the Broadway Deli, 3rd Street Promenade, Santa Monica. Free coffee refills all day. Sit at the bar where De Niro met Amy Brenneman in ‘Heat’. The corner booth behind you is where Michael Mann wrote ‘The Insider’. The menu is huge and it’s the best short-order food in the world.
The best situated Starbucks in London is at St Katherine’s Wharf. Sit outside and watch people a lot richer than you are messing about with big yachts.
Olive et Gourmando on Rue St Paul in Montreal is fantastic. It’s a bit of a rock star hangout and impossible to get into at weekends, but great for coffee and croissants on a weekday morning.
Finally, when in Vienna, insist on going to Starbucks – it really annoys the locals who think they invented coffee but seem incapable of delivering the drink in any vessel larger than a thimble.
May 30, 2009 at 9:54 am
ememess
Excellent-sounding suggestions from everyone – thank you. And yes, the Broadway Deli – should have remembered that one. The corn beef hash is stellar there, too.
May 30, 2009 at 11:27 am
Andrea
If in need of a Sartrean Parisian cliche at eye-widening prices (sorry, not sure where the accent button is on this thing, so ‘cleesh’ it will have to be), I prefer the Cafe Flore or Brasserie Lipp. Magots is usually full of tourists hoping for some long-extinct ghostly literary scene to spring up in front of them, looking at other tourists who are looking back at them, and it all gets a bit too post-modernist to relax and concentrate on the pro-revolutionary newspaper you bought by mistake at a kiosk.
Patisserie Valerie is a national treasure but I was disturbed last time I was there to find white wine wasn’t available during afternoon teatime with a mille feuille…
May 31, 2009 at 9:56 am
ememess
That is disturbing… 😉
And yes, Flore is also good… and the food’s actually a bit better there, I think… but I do like Magots’ view across the square.
June 1, 2009 at 7:53 pm
Joe
Coffee Time, Portland, Oregon.
Some of the most interesting conversations with some of the friendliest people I’ve had the good fortune to meet have happened there, as well as one of the more interesting co-incidences when I met a lass who’d attended some of the same nights I had back in London during my student days.
The coffee was awesome too. 🙂
June 2, 2009 at 9:51 am
Andrew Hills
I’m not a big coffee drinker (or even a little one – I’m on the quantumn scale if anything ), but even I can see the glaring omission from your list. Surely number #5 (if not higher) should be….
….At home, at the foot of the bed, directly after making fantastic love to Natalie Portman.
Or am I missing the point?
June 2, 2009 at 11:22 am
ememess
I tried to keep my list to locales attainable within the broad outlines of consensual reality.
June 10, 2009 at 5:27 pm
Julie
Intelligensia Coffee & Tea in Silverlake (Los Angeles)… Opens every day at 6am. Brews one cup at a time, using beans from the usual suspects (Ethiopia, Columbia, Kenya), plus more random spots like Rwanda, Honduras, and Bolivia. By-the-cup beans are rotated daily — try not to freak out when Bolivia’s not on the menu. Really amazing place.
June 17, 2009 at 12:50 pm
simon rushbrook
Clowns, King St. Cambridge.
If you’re ever in the hallowed city of learning…
The best coffee in a vibrant, joyful, truly Italian stylee. Still going strong despite the abundance of beige conformist (should that be green/white) chains…
Closer to home for me, Bridport-Number 10 http://www.no10cafebar.co.uk/
If you’re hanging from a Friday night or have brunchtime munchies, they have phenomenal bubble & squeak.
June 17, 2009 at 1:06 pm
ememess
Excellent. I went to college in said hallowed city, but haven’t been back in years and years. I’ll look out for it…
August 21, 2009 at 7:46 pm
hotDiggityBlog
| The very best place to sit and have a cup of coffee is the place you sit. I’m getting up. Come on … get up. I’m going over to check the pot, and … come along. There is just enough lukewarm liquid for an iced coffee. A little soy milk, honey and a dash of nutmeg. My sweet liquid drug.