Paris Notes November 2003

PARIS NOTES

November 2003

Volume 12 Issue 9

"Why would you choose this café?" asks David Benayoun, a waiter at Café de la Mairie. "It's the same all the time, same people. There's nothing extraordinary."

Sandwiches, snacks, no hot meals served except omelets. No fancy drinks. "Coffee, beer, pastis. It's classic," Benayoun attests.

Ah, therein lies the appeal. Café de la Mairie is your basic Paris watering hole.

The wide sidewalk terrace faces Place Saint-Sulpice. From the vantage of a plastic-caned chair, the church towers rise to the left and the mairie of the 6th arrondissement flanks the right. And each day the café attracts its cross-section of Paris life.

Standing at the bar, here are a bearded man with ponytail and trench coat, a laborer in paint-stained jeans, an elderly matron with her cane. Workers from adjacent boutiques like Muji and Yves Saint-Laurent zip over for their "pause café." Even celebs like Catherine Deneuve (who lives on the Place Saint-Sulpice) sometime show up, partly because, in Benayoun's words, "It's not a chic place. It's not the Deux Magots, or the Flore. It's a place where they can come and not be bothered."

And blend into the background. The interior is a hodge-podge of quasi-’60s Space-Age styles and materials in need of a face-lift: faux-marble bar topped with stainless steel (not zinc), dingy tile floor littered with cigarette butts and crumpled receipts, odd circular ceiling fixtures leaking fluorescent light. A veneer-paneled back room, two squat toilets, one telephone booth. On the bar, four beer tap handles, a cluster of water carafes, ubiquitous steel spheres containing their treasure of sugar cubes. Behind: four-spigot espresso machine, upside-down bottles of Ricard and Chivas Regal, bowl of hard-boiled eggs. A wry manager who handles the till. A straight-faced barman measuring and fixing the drinks for the four servers shuffling about in their black and white penguin suits and bow ties.

"Un express!" "Un crème!" the garçons de café call out. "Café serré!" "Deux décas allongés!" The roar of the espresso machine competes with the lion fountain spouting water directly across the street.

Some of the waiters have worked here for a decade. After only eight months on the job, Benayoun, 32, already knows the ropes. He moves efficiently from table to table, taking orders, clearing empty cups and glasses. "I didn't know what to do," he confesses when asked why he chose the job. He may have been influenced by his father, a 35-year Parisian café veteran.

"It's a good place to work," he says. "Good salary, clientele, and I have liberté"—by which he means he has Sundays free. He works five days a week, typically beginning his shift at 11:30am and working through till closing, a 12-hour day, with only a half-hour break for a meal. In wintertime, shifts are shortened to eight hours, reflecting the seasonal downturn in business. His efforts are rewarded with one of the city's better paychecks for the métier.

If the long shift partially explains café waiters' notoriously surly attitudes, Benayoun says tourists can help smooth the waiter-client relationship, too. One: Americans should grasp the conflicting expectation for customer service between their country and France. Two: though he speaks decent English, Benayoun thinks more Americans should make an effort to try his language. "It's true they are demanding and want attention. But the average American is like the average French person. Some are better than others."

He's particularly amused by questions about the safety of tap water, "as if France wasn't a developed country." Indeed, plenty has changed for the better since coffee first flowed in Parisians' veins more than 300 years ago.

The histories of cafés and coffee are, naturally, blended together. The first Paris café is said to have opened in 1672 by an Armenian named Pascal, back when the beverage had more of a medicinal reputation (curing miscarriages, scurvy, constipation and the common cold, among other ailments; this may explain the French penchant for an after-dinner coffee digestif). Turkish diplomats tried to seduce Louis XIV with the "black wine." The Hôtel d'Aubusson on Rue Dauphine (6th) claims "eau de café" was first imbibed on their premises in 1690. Others say no, 1686, at Café Procope (still in existence just down the street), where Voltaire drank some 40 cups of a coffee-chocolate blend each day.

If the exact date and who first introduced the drink are debatable, it was the Auvergnats who popularized the café experience. In the 18th century, this clan arrives in droves from the French hinterlands, indigent, peddling water and lemonade door to door, then from carts, then opening cafés. They are responsible for Paris’ most famous: Deux Magots, Flore, Lipp. By 1800, 700 cafés spring up; by 1840 that number quadruples. Paris becomes addicted to caffeine. Connoisseurs complain the java is better the further you travel from the banks of the Seine—say, Vienna or Rome—but Paris is where the drink becomes a fashion statement and its coffee houses become the most grandiose in the world.

Cafés come to serve practical functions in the day-to-day life of city folk, whose apartments are so petite as to prevent clear thinking. The corner café becomes an extension of the living room. Literary movements, revolutions, artists, politicians and musicians all get their start in the cramped, smoke-choked spaces. Heavy drinkers also get their start at cafés; alongside the espresso imbibers at 9am are the quiet men downing a quick "demi" before heading off to work.

Stewart Lee Allen, in his irreverent book "The Devil's Cup: A History of the World According to Coffee," attributes most of 20th-century philosophy and art not to French brilliance but boredom, caffeine and pomposity, "the main symptoms of which are cubism, surrealism and existentialism. All those earthshaking theories were nothing more than a desperate attempt to rationalize that extra ten-franc expenditure." (The proprietor of Café de Flore accused Sartre of being "the most awful client " sitting from morning to night over a single drink.) Since the golden age, Parisians seem more content reading Le Monde or a Flammarion paperback in peace than plotting the next government coup.

According to Patricia Wells' "The Food Lover's Guide to Paris," the city has about 12,000 cafés. Allen says there are closer to 60,000 (down from a high of 252,000 in 1960). Part of the discrepancy may be due to the vague definition of "café." Plenty of establishments calling themselves "cafés" are actually full-fledged bistros; others are closer to the traditional sense of "brasserie" (literally, brewery), more known for food than drink. Tea salons could also be classified as cafés, but the kind of experience you'll have depends on the neighborhood: North African men smoking water pipes and sipping mint tea, or elderly ladies muttering over Earl Gray and cookies. However cafés are classified, though, their number dwindles each year due to the chain franchising and fast-fooding of France.

For now, cafés are part of the slow-food movement. They do encourage you to linger. On clear days, sunshine filters through the sycamores to brighten the interior of Café de la Mairie, while the south-facing terrace—with room for about 50—quickly becomes the neighborhood’s most popular outdoor hangout.

Benayoun confirms his café's lackadaisical pace and lack of pressure: "If you spend the whole day here, I don't care."