Paris may be famous for its sidewalk cafés, but in truth, the coffee being served was pretty terrible until recently, when a coffee renaissance took place at the hands of Anglophone transplants to the French capital.
The French have long lain claim to quality in nearly all things gastronomic, from wine to cheese to bread. While they have certainly been enjoying coffee since it arrived in Paris in the 17th century, they have never boasted the coffee of their Italian neighbors, who not only invented the espresso machine in 1884, but championed a distinct, quality-driven coffee culture.
“We don’t have baristas in France,” says native Londoner Channa Galhenage, founder and owner of Paris’ Loustic coffee shop. “Whereas you cross the border into Italy, and of course, they invented the word barista.”
Waiters pulling espressos in Parisian cafés, he says, usually get a “two-minute training” and use beans that are often ground several weeks in advance. The resulting cafés are bitter and, more often than not, filled with grounds.
David Flynn, co-founder and co-owner of Belleville Brûlerie, agrees, noting that in Italy, there is “more of a reverence for the craft of making coffee, which you never really had here.”
The proof is in the cup: Italy’s espressos are eons better than those served at Parisian cafés, despite the fact that both France and Italy have a preference for the bitter Robusta coffee bean.
“Arabica coffee is finer, more complex, more subtle,” says Marie Cerinotti, Communication and Marketing Director for Café Lomi. “Robusta, on the other hand, is more powerful, stronger, and often used in blends because the flavors are less developed.”
This isn’t to say that France is completely devoid of coffee culture: after all the café, that quintessentially Parisian establishment, is named for the drink. Paris’ first, Le Procope, opened in 1686, and by the beginning of the 19th century the city boasted more than 3,000. It was at Le Procope that French Revolutionaries engaged in hearty debates and, not far away, at Flore and Deux Magots, that literary minds like Sartre and De Beauvoir or Hemingway and Fitzgerald met to exchange ideas.
“The café was the meeting place, the social space,” explains Galhenage. “It was like an extension of an outdoor living room.”
The café was popularized not thanks to, but perhaps in spite of, the poor quality of the coffee served there: out of a desire for ritual and a place to meet.
“I think it’s more about that shared moment than what’s actually in the cup,” says Cerinotti.
For Galhenage, this discrepancy between the French reverence for wine and food and their apathy for coffee goes a bit deeper, stemming from the fact that the French have never considered coffee something that even could be artisanal.
“French people drink their coffee like a medicine,” he says. “It’s just down the hatch.”
A new coffee scene has, however, arrived in Paris, thanks in large part to American, British, and Australian expats, who, over the past decade, have set about opening the sort of coffee shop they’re used to from back home, boasting pricier single-origin filter coffees, Anglo-style baked goods, and far shorter opening hours than the typical Parisian café, which often stays open until 2am. The Anglo influence is evident in the names of these locales – Lomi, despite highlighting French savoir-faire and terroir, calls itself a coffee shop; Loustic is an espresso bar. It’s even reflected in the clientele: Galhenage notes that approximately 50 percent of his customers are French, which, he notes, “is probably the highest for a Paris coffee shop.”
“The others have about 70 to 80 percent foreign,” he says.
While these establishments are in no way trying to keep locals at a distance, their very approach to coffee makes passing through the door a feat for many French people.
“It’s just not our way of consuming coffee in France,” says Cerinotti.
Slowly, artisanal coffee is taking root in Paris. Coffees roasted at Lomi and Belleville are appearing not just in Anglo coffee shops, but in restaurants and hotels where an emphasis on terroir had already been evident across the rest of the menu but, as Cerinotti explains, “the philosophy hadn’t made its way to the cup.”
Still, Galhenage notes that great coffee won’t truly be democratized in France until it makes its way to back to the cafés.
He says that the opening of La Fontaine de Belleville, a new venture from the team at Belleville Brûlerie, is indicative of this future. It is an establishment the likes of which Paris has not yet seen, uniting the ingredient-driven mentality so pervasive on the modern Parisian dining scene with the atmosphere so unique to the classic café.
“We wanted to move away from good coffee being something that was very Anglo-Saxon focused,” says Flynn of the venture. While he notes that it’s a more difficult endeavor than a coffee shop, with longer hours, a more complex menu, and more suppliers to contend with, the adventure is panning out the way he had hoped, finally bringing quality coffee into the cups of the French. La Fontaine, he says, boasts “easily” a 70 percent French clientele.
“France and Paris have such an incredible café culture,” he says. “It would be a shame to lose that for the sake of good coffee.”
