Watch the world go by
Parisians are known for café life, but that doesn’t mean they serve great coffee. Paris café coffee is often bland and does not originate from the volcanic lava fields of Kona or the highlands of Guatemala, nor is it pooped out by the Asian palm civet. The Paris café is also not where you hold business meetings or stare into a laptop screen. The Parisian café is an experience that involves lingering over a conversation, and eventually a glass of wine, if you stay there long enough. It’s where neighbors gather, where you sit and watch the world go by, where you live. It’s a moveable feast.
Paris cafés have been centers of intellectual and artistic discussion. Writers, philosophers, and artists would frequent certain cafés to engage in heated debates, share ideas, or find inspiration for their next masterpiece. Places like Les Deux Magots and Café des Flors have lost their charm, though, as tourists fill all the seats and look at their phones instead of talking to each other. In the last few years, when I’ve tried going to those hallowed places to read a book or write in my journal, the servers have started asking me if I want to order anything more and then placing the check on the table before I’ve even asked for it, presumably to clear the way for a higher dollar spender.
For a more traditional Parisian café experience these days, I wander away from the central arrondissements to the neighborhoods where I can still sit with one coffee all afternoon and the servers will ignore me until I’ve attempted to wave them over at least four times. While walking through the 11th to dinner one evening, I chuckled when I spotted a scruffy man wearing a scarf and reading Camus while smoking a cigarette outside a café along the less commercial and less crowded upper part of the Canal Saint-Martin.
In the early evening, the cafés fill up for apéro hour when people drink light beer (called une blonde) or a glass of white wine and talk until dinner, which normally begins no earlier than 7 or 7:30. Cafés in Paris serve full meals, but you don’t usually go to a café for the food. Some salty snacks like potato chips or olives might be brought out with your drinks, or you could order a cheese plate. In the colder months, I like slurping down raw oysters bathing in their briny juices.
Many cute new bougie coffee shops fusing Parisian charm with contemporary coffee culture have sprung up throughout the city. They make great coffee and even offer diverse milk choices, which has been great for me since I discovered a low-level lactose intolerance. I recently stayed near Place St. Georges and discovered Stella, which was decorated entirely in an instagrammable pale pink palette and furnished with mid-century modern-ish cushioned chairs. They offered tasty coffee and flavored teas ordered from a touch screen, strong Wi-Fi, and American-sized muffins, no croissants.
Up the hill toward Montmartre, a takeaway window served coffee in paper cups. I started noticing more and more people walking around with paper cups of coffee, which I had never seen in Paris until recently. I’d been taught never to eat or drink while walking in Paris, which was considered gauche. Normally, if you want a quick caffeine pick me up, you stand for a few minutes at the bar in a café and drink a shot or two of espresso served in a tiny cup for a smaller price. I’d also been taught never to order a coffee drink with milk after 12 PM. Instead, I’ve learned to drink a noisette in the afternoon, which is an espresso with a dash of milk to give it a hazelnut coloring but not hazelnut flavor. I only recently discovered that the French do not make French press coffee.
One of my favorite “new” cafés in Paris is called Dose, which is nestled under a medieval stone arch along Rue Mouffetard, a long cobblestoned street that winds through the heart of the Latin Quarter. The baristas, called dealeristas here, make delicious coffee with an unusually friendly and helpful attitude in a cozy space.
My very favorite café in Paris is Tabac Café across the street from where I lived in Montmartre. I went there most mornings to write in my journal and read the news while surrounded by French speakers. By late morning, tourists replaced the locals and it would be time to leave. I don’t recommend you go out of your way to visit the Tabac Café, and not because I’m keeping it for myself. I’d tried every café on my street and though the Tabac wasn’t the most beautiful one, with flowers cascading down the facade and colorful wicker chairs lined out front like other ones nearby, this one that felt right for me. If you’re visiting Paris for a short time, I recommend visiting the cafés near wherever you are staying and find one that suits you, then keep going back.
