Cafe Culture

While a lot of the action in soap operas like Eastenders and Coronation Street centres on the pub, in sit-coms characters are more inclined to gravitate towards coffee bars, with Cafe Nervosa and Central Perk playing important roles in shows like Frasier and Friends. In fact whole episodes of Frasier seem to be set in the coffee shop and one show follows the Crane brothers as they search for a new regular haunt after being driven out of Nervosa when a guitarist (played by Elvis Costello) is hired to play folk music. Coffee shops in sit-coms are nothing new, however. Back in the 1950’s, Hancock’s Half Hour regularly featured them. In one show Tony meets his childhood sweetheart in a Chiswick coffee bar, in another he lists the plethora of coffee shops in Cheam High Street, and in a third he actually runs his own coffee bar.

Frasier & Niles - Cafe Nervosa. Picture: CBS

Although the first coffee houses opened in England in the 17^th century (the renowned insurers, Lloyd’s of London began life in Lloyd’s Coffee House in 1688), it was in the 1950’s that the coffee bar scene exploded in London. Coinciding with the invention of the teenager and skiffle and rock ‘n’ roll music, coffee bars sprang up all over Soho and the West End, spreading through suburbia where they provided an invaluable meeting place for teenagers to drink frothy coffee and listen to their favourite music, live or through a juke box.

By the time I became a teenager the coffee bar had almost disappeared from Britain’s High Streets, being largely confined to Soho, where the Moka Bar had become London’s most well known in 1953. During my teenage years I cannot remember setting foot in a coffee bar. And even as recently as twenty years ago my home town was something of a desert so far as coffee shops were concerned, with Morelli’s being just about the only one I can recall. Today Romford can boast (if that’s the right word) three Costa Coffees, two Starbucks, a Coffee Republic, a Patisserie Valerie and sundry other independent coffee shops.

In Britain we are drinking less tea than we used to – in 2015, tea consumption was 22% lower than it had been five years previously – as visiting coffee shops becomes more and more popular and more and more of them are opened. The relaxation of licensing laws in 2005 might not have created the ‘cafe culture’ that the then Labour government envisaged, but nowadays most British High Streets feature at least one coffee shop with pavement tables and customers sipping their mochas and cappuccinos – albeit that some of them are sitting outside only because they cannot smoke indoors. It may also be a feature of immigration from European countries that have more of a cafe tradition than a pub culture that means that these days many coffee shops include among their customers groups of mid-twenties men who one would normally expect to be in the nearest Wetherspoons. It does, however seem a pity that while coffee shops in the West End stay open late into the evening,  those in suburbia tend to close their doors at six or seven o’clock. There must be a market for them to stay open later for those people who want to meet friends but want neither a formal meal in a restaurant nor an evening in the pub.

Having once favoured Costa or Starbucks, these days Val and I tend to gravitate towards Caffe Nero with Coffee Republic or Patisserie Valerie (or Pat Val, as we call it) our regular back-ups. And while there is a lot of snobbery about coffee and even more capacity for ‘customisation’ a la Niles Crane’s order in an episode of Frasier ; "Double Cappuccino - half-caf, non-fat milk, with just enough foam to be aesthetically pleasing but not so much that it leaves a moustache," my regular order tends to be an Americano, which leaves little room for personalisation other than how much milk to add. Val, on the other hand, while not being fussy, tends to tailor her favourite cappuccino by having it made with skimmed milk and with a single shot. Mind you, I’m not sure whether requesting a single shot and skinny milk would have made any difference the day we were in Mallorca and walked from Palma to C’an Pastilla where we stopped for a coffee. C’an Pastilla looked pretty similar to how I remembered it from my last visit, the best part of thirty years earlier, and if the resort seemed trapped in a time-warp, so did Val’s cappuccino. It arrived topped with whipped cream from a can, and chocolate, looking like a throw-back to the 1980’s. It bore more than a passing resemblance to a 99 ice cream. This is, however, not typical of our experiences ordering coffee abroad; there is something glamorous and seductive about sitting outside a cafe in some Spanish or Italian piazza, sipping coffee and watching the world go by that it is somehow not possible to replicate on the British High Street, no matter how hard we try.

C'an Pastilla seemed stuck in the 1980's...

...and so did the coffee. (This picture from lkpheartsfood.net)

It may be because on the Continent  taking coffee is more of a ritual than we see it in Britain –although that is changing, if slowly – that the experience of drinking it there is exactly that, an experience, rather than just a means of quenching one’s thirst. And the country we probably most associate with coffee drinking as an experience is Italy, although it is only since the end of the Second World war that coffee has gained such a firm tradition. Prior to 1939 coffee was the preserve of the elite, with most Italians drinking hot drinks made from roasted barley or chicory. So what will Italians, for whom coffee is pretty much synonymous with espresso, make of Starbucks, who have announced plans to open their first outlet in Milan in 2017? On the basis that the Starbucks experience is pretty consistent world-wide, it is unlikely that the chain – which coincidentally opened its first store in Seattle forty-five years ago this week and now has nearly 24,000 outlets in sixty-seven countries – is going to make any concessions for the Italian market. That suggests that the Italian coffee aficionado will not be beating a path to Starbucks’ door, but for the younger generation, and particularly those who have travelled and come across their stores in other countries, Starbucks may be less of a culture shock. Personally I’m not a great Starbucks fan; the coffee is consistent but somewhat bland, but they have their place, especially in a family group where not everyone wants an espresso or an Americano, given their wide range of other drinks. Starbucks may not be to everyone’s taste, but just as another American institution, McDonalds, have conquered the world by offering a speedy alternative to the more formal restaurant meal, so Starbucks have their place alongside the more traditional cafe.

The first Starbucks in the UK opened in 1998, on the Kings Road in Chelsea, twenty years after Costa opened their first store and a year after the first Caffe Nero. Between them these three chains transformed a somewhat moribund UK coffee market; considering Britain drinks over 60 billion cups of the stuff every year, it's surprising no one has done the same for tea.