Parisian café

Parisian cafés serve as a center of social and culinary life in Paris. They have been around since the 17th century, and serve as the meeting place, neighborhood hub, conversation matrix, rendez-vous spot, and networking source, a place to relax or to refuel - the social and political pulse of the city. Parisian cafés show the Parisian way of sitting undisturbed for a couple of hours, watching things happening and people going by.

Typical Paris cafés are not coffee shops. They generally come with a complete kitchen offering a restaurant menu with meals for any time of the day, a full bar and even a wine selection. Among the drinks customarily served are the "grande crème" (large cup of white coffee), wine by the glass, beer ("un demi", half a pint, or "une pression", a glass of draught beer), "un pastis" (made with aniseed flavour spirit), and "un espresso" (a small cup of black coffee). Drinking at the bar is cheaper than doing so at one of the tables. The café sometimes doubles as a "bureau de tabac", a tobacco shop that sells a wide variety of merchandise, including metro tickets and prepaid phone cards.

Some of the most recognizable Paris cafés include Café de la Paix, Les Deux Magots, Café de Flore, Café de la Rotonde, La Coupole, Le Fouquet's, Le Deauville, as well as a new wave represented by Café Beaubourg and Drugstore Publicis. The oldest still in operation is the Café Procope, which opened in 1686.

Coffee had been introduced to Paris in 1644, and the first café opened in 1672, but the institution did not become successful until the opening of Café Procope in about 1689 in rue des Fossés-Saint-Germain, close to the Comédie-Française, which had just moved to that location. The café served coffee, tea, chocolate, liqueurs, ice cream and confiture in a luxurious setting. The Café Procope was frequented by Voltaire (when he was not in exile), Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Diderot and D’Alembert. Cafés became important centers for exchanging news, rumors and ideas, often more reliable than the newspapers of the day. In 1723 there were about 323 cafés in Paris; by 1790 there were more than 1,800. They were places for meeting friends, and for literary and political discussion. As Hurtaut and Magny wrote in their ‘’Dictionnaire de Paris’’ in 1779: "One gets the news there, either by conversation, or by reading the newspapers. You don’t have to encounter anyone with bad morals, no loud persons, no soldiers, no domestics, no one who could trouble the tranquility of society." Women rarely entered cafés, but women of the nobility sometimes stopped their carriages outside and were served inside the carriage with cups on silver platters. During the Revolution the cafés turned into centers of furious political discussion and activity, often led by members of the Revolutionary clubs. Following the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, billiard rooms were added to some famous 18th-century cafés in Paris and other cities.

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Wikipedia