Like so many love affairs, this one began in a quiet café near the Seine in Paris. Unlike those others, this was not the chance meeting of two wanderlust strangers, eyes dancing over the top of books not being read. Nor the dreamy gaze that follows a handsome patron’s catching a falling waitress, nor even a random conversation uniting two souls’ destinies. It wasn’t like any of those. In fact, it wasn’t with a person at all.
This café was the kind of place where famous authors famously sat to write famous novels before their infamous demise. And at a small table tucked away by windows peering over rustic streets, their glass dripping toward Notre Dame, I was baptized. Not into the church, not into prose, but into the complex, the complicated, the rich and robust world of coffee. A world that, even just an hour earlier, I would have declared I could unapologetically avoid.
How I had hated coffee. The look, the smell, the feel, the taste. I hated everything about it as long as I can remember hating anything about beverages or foodstuffs. Roasted, dried, mocha-fied. In chocolate, in ice cream, in liquor, in anything. Hated it.
For a time I tried to quaff in the culture of coffee drinkers. A fast-paced and productive culture carefully groomed to maintain an intellectual appearance I so wanted to have. Alas, my excursions there left nothing but bitter tastes in my mouth. I preferred the shame and humiliation of that timeless winter classic – hot chocolate – whilst my peers (or so I thought, though I doubt they reciprocated as I chugged my Neapolitan-Lacto-Choco-Blast) savored sophisticated java.
I confess I have a compulsive need to both fit in wherever I find myself, and stand out as an individual thinker. A popular outcast, if you will. A free, group-thinker. To be in the crowd, but not of the crowd. I’ve always hated that feeling of being outside the circle; of looking through glass at happy diners and their culinary delicacies while trapped on the green searching for an entrance and running from self doubt’s demon-dog.
(As you scrape your memory for the preceding 80s blockbuster movie reference, I’ll add that it was that very compulsion that helped me turn the corner.)
Just after touchdown on my first trip to Paris, I found myself jaw-dropped, nose and cheek pressed against the glass, gawking at fashionable, thin smokers sitting and sipping . . . coffee. Though I bore a cocoa brown HC on my palate for years, self-conciousness was not about to commit the international traveler’s cardinal sin of being from America and looking like it. You know the people of whom I speak: the guy wearing the ridiculously huge, clearly inflatable and blinding red Kansas City Chiefs jacket in the Louvre, or that family with the matching sneakers, squeaking their nikadidasumas all over the floor where Napoleon was wedded to Josephine.
How a culture consumes its coffee says perhaps more than anything else about what it means to be a part of that culture. And I was more than desperate to fit into it. So as my wife and I entered the café, I fully intended on ordering (mega gulp) coffee.
One hurdle remained: I didn’t know anything meaningful about coffee and now I was about to order some in a global capitol of coffee drinking. My infantile language skills, barely good enough to make out a few words on le menu, didn’t help slow the adrenaline coursing through my body, heightening my awareness that I had no idea what the hell I was doing there, and urging me to leap out of the chair, spring for the door and slam a coke somewhere (which is noticeably more refreshing in Europe thanks to the absence of high fructose corn syrup – a topic for another occasion). Being French, the server arrived at our table an excruciating fifteen minutes after we sat our jet-lagged derrières. Watching his lips allow the escape of sounds, which brought none of a year of college French to mind, I assumed I ought to order. I spoke two words with a frogginess that at least might have given him the impression that I, too, was a chain smoker. Two lip-licking, luscious words that would be the beginning of my romance with coffee.
Just two tiny French words. Café Crème.
Mmm, how they roll off the tongue, like Proust. Café Crème. I often dream of that moment and literally taste again for the first time what it means to be French. A culture exclusively renowned for culture; a culture that savors every slow sip of its café. The French don’t order café to go and then consume this beverage while prancing, meandering, striding or pounding the pavement on their way to anywhere. On the contrary they will order a coffee, and sit, and drink. They just drink, simply for the pleasure of the experience. No thought of productivity, no obsessions about meetings or agenda items. Only coffee and croissant and desgustation. If no where else in the world, in France, doing “nothing” is doing something.
Ironically, the trip left me quite cynical (since after one week I was now an expert on all things café) about coffee culture in the U.S., believing that we were beyond repentance. Taking the time to stop and enjoy such a multi-sensory experience like a cup of coffee is a thing long lost in America. Thus we have awful coffee. In our big-box, mega-conglomerate, profit-minded, market-driven food culture, we’ve devalued experiences of the wonderful and new because we are conditioned to favor the familiar. Two full generations have come and gone immersed in this paradigm and we’ve lost the tools and palate for sensory adventure or even simple appreciation.
But it’s not too late to once again smell new aromas and taste flavors that truly demand attention and reflection. My grandfather – a man of the last generation not reared on rampant consumerism and homogenization of taste – with a single cup o’ joe, gave me hope.
Before I left for to visit my grandparents in Florida, I dreaded what coffee I might imbibe. Would it be the diner sludge so many daily tolerate not realizing the universe of unfathomable flavor just outside their cup? Would it be the thrice-reused grounds and swill that is New York City street vendor coffee? Starbucks? Those are almost all the choices these days. Though many good local coffee shops brew in college towns and quaint, old downtowns, they are not the standard bearers of coffee culture this side of the Atlantic.
The first morning, Grandpa rose with the sun and had completed eight sudoku before eyes had rolled from the back of my head. Dragging myself to kitchen to endure whatever was about to pass for coffee, I found Grandpa in the kitchen with a burlap sack of raw green Guatemalan coffee beans, carefully shoveling scoops into a jet black coffee roaster, equipped with a small catalytic converter to quell the smoke that would otherwise coat the kitchen when roasting coffee beans at home. One has many expectations before a trip to Florida, both good and bad, but homemade, fresh-roasted coffee was not one. Yet there I was with a rich and bold mug of black coffee, cradled in hand on a dewy Ocala winter’s morn that I could not have had anywhere else in the world.
That is beauty. I can’t say it rivaled the seduction of a café crème. But I can say it was a delicious and unique adventure, a special opportunity to broaden my experiences – to have hot water that’s dripped over ground, burnt beans change my worldview.
It reminded me there exists an ocean of new experiences waiting for us to reject the notion that what we already know and like is what is unquestionably best – waiting for us to indeed question, to ask ourselves if we’re merely habitual creatures unwittingly shaped by consumerism. Have I settled for rotten and ubiquitous fallen fruit when the door to the garden of delights is wide open beckoning me to come in, look up and taste the world that ought to be? A world that will be.
It’s sad that what drove me out of my shallow preferences was an improbable mixture of vanity and self-consciousness. What is brilliant is that it was my grandfather – a man categorized with those stereotyped as unmovable and stuck in their ways – who embraced an epicurean adventure that taught me, so can we all. So say we all.