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Wednesday, January 08, 2003

Café Society

If I had to put my finger on one thing that America needs to import from Europe or Latin America (more European than the States), it would be the concept of cafes. The idea of a café is a difficult concept to explain to someone who hasn’t traveled. We have restaurants with outdoor seating; we have Starbucks for coffee. What’s the difference?

On one hand, the idea of a café is remarkably simple: A public place to sit and have a drink or maybe something to eat. On the other hand, the idea is incredibly complex because the café serves so many purposes in the community. “Community” is the key word here as I think that a lot of American cities have no such notion because--in a society dominated by the private automobile--there is so little interaction between people.

Ironically (or perhaps not), I write this while sitting in the giant Seattle Center House—sort of a town hall mixed with a mall food court without the obnoxious mall part. The Center House is about a block from my apartment and about the closest thing to a café as you will find in Seattle or this country for that matter.

A café is a place to read, write, sit alone or with friends, drink coffee or have a glass of wine, spend twenty minutes or two hours. Less formal than a restaurant, a café can be a few rough tables in a remote Greek mountain village or a chic Parisian hotspot frequented by the rich and famous, and people like you and me who will feel that way simply by being there.

Your coffee comes in elegant china, not a paper cup. Wine seems to actually taste better while sitting on the terrace as you watch tout le monde pass by on the boulevard. Planners have actually designed cities with cafes in mind. Plazas in Europe and Latin America would be fairly pointless without the vantage point of cafes for their enjoyment.

American attempts to duplicate cafes generally fail because there is too much emphasis on consumption. Instead of just leaving you the fuck alone, some overly-eager server will be giving you a schpeel on their special on mozzarella sticks or bullying you to order another beer. In most European cafes, the price of a single beverage is all the rent you need to pay on that table. A lot of cafes are so big that turn-over isn’t much of an issue. The pace is simply different there. You take a seat to slow things down and not to continue the consumerist race to a finish line that is impossible to define.

In other countries, cafes are an integral part of everyone’s life and their importance in the community cannot be exaggerated. It is a place to hang out for teenagers, adults, and families. I miss them terribly and a café is usually my first destination when I go to Europe.

The slow pace and simplicity of cafes are things that a lot of Americans find difficult to grasp on first encounter. Born and raised in this country, I was a little puzzled on my first trip to France as an 18 year old. I would sit down, order a drink, chug it down, pay, and leave. I didn’t get it. I gradually became self-conscious of my haste as I soon noticed that everyone who was sitting there when I arrived was still there as I left.

This was a very pivotal bit of awareness, a gradual epiphany that shaped the way in which I looked at the world. It became apparent to me that life isn’t a race, that being busy isn’t synonymous with living with purpose. I didn’t learn this lesson overnight. To this day I am still learning about how I can live the best life that I possibly can. I just like to have a nice spot to sit down and think about it.

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