Blogcritics

The Great Cafés: Cafe Impresso at El Ateneo Grand Splendid, Buenos Aires

Terence Clarke — Fri, 4 Apr 2008 15:32:03 EDT

This caf� immediately fits the bill for the basics of a great caf�: history, theater, Tango, fine books, and great coffee.
The Café Impresso, in El Ateneo Grand Splendid at Avenida Santa Fe 1860 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, immediately fits the bill for the basics of a great café. All is here: a well-appointed wait staff, real ceramic plates, glass glasses, proper napkins, an accommodating attitude, and all the food and drink that would be served in any very...

The Great Cafés: Confiter�a Ideal, Buenos Aires

Terence Clarke — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 13:03:36 EST

For the essence of tango, you can do no better.
The kids are dancing tango again in Buenos Aires, fueled by new styles of tango music that are laced with hip-hop elements, jazz riffs, rhythm and blues licks, and suggestions and samples of rock and roll. You still encounter some younger people in this city that feign a lack of interest, who say that tango is the music of their grandparents and...

The Great Cafés: Sabrett, New York City

Terence Clarke — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 12:06:11 EST

Where West meets East, outside.
Normally a great café must have a roof, but there are those rare ones that will indeed cause you to have to worry about rain and wind. If that's the case, other things as well may jeopardize the place's standing as great. No chairs, for example. No tables. No silverware.There can still be reasons why the place is great, and in the case of the...

The Great Cafés: Café Sabarsky, The Neue Galerie, New York City

Terence Clarke — Mon, 8 Oct 2007 15:24:44 EDT

Mrs. Vanderbilt, Mrs. Astor, a terrific party, and Gustav Klimt.
I’m not sure that fine art actually needs coffee. But fine coffee -- accompanied by conversation, of course, with someone you care for -- benefits mightily from the prospect of viewing art later in the day.Yet you seldom have the opportunity to see one of the very great paintings of the last 150 years - a world-famous work that richly...

The Great Cafés: Caffé Trieste, San Francisco

Terence Clarke — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 13:24:43 EDT

A writer reflects on coffee, obscenity, and Allen Ginsberg.
Foster's Cafeteria in San Francisco no longer exists. It perforce does not qualify as a great café, but that doesn't matter because it was indeed just a cafeteria. You had to slide a tray along a kind of chrome track, picking from the various Jello desserts, leathery eggs, meatloaf that resembled shaped fertilizer, doughnuts that oozed liquid,...

Announcement: Short-content feeds

Phillip Winn — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 12:00:00 EDT

Sunday, August 26, 2007, marks the switch of all Blogcritics.org article feeds from full-content to short-content. This is the result of several converging factors, and is unfortunately a permanent decision (as permanent as any decision can be on the web, that is). We are aware of all of the reasons that this is a Bad Idea, and we are aware that some of you will be quite upset about having to click on something to read the free content, and we're sorry. Unfortunately, despite great effort, full-content feeds are not currently economically viable. Two other factors are involved: full-content feeds have resulted in an unprecedented level of content theft, with BC content appearing on many websites, usually spam sites, without attribution or permission. This duplicate content causes a cascading set of problems, not the least of which is that search engines generally aren't favorable to duplicate content, and don't always guess correctly. Finally, our RSS advertising partner is strongly in favor of short-content feeds. We hope that you'll continue to subscribe to BC via RSS, and when an article grabs your eye, it's only a click away, still free on the BC website. Thank you for your understanding.

The Great Cafés: Cafe Tortoni, Buenos Aires

Terence Clarke — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 18:02:50 EDT

The word "café" has immediate associations for everyone. We all know what one is, and in every major city in the world you can arrange a meeting with an acquaintance by simply suggesting a certain café around the corner, a baroque favorite in some odd neighborhood or the famous cafe you've read about that's noted for the literati who frequent it, the film stars, the politicians. The aroma of coffee or pastry comes to mind immediately as does, of course, conversation, maybe even intrigue. The very word "café" is so well known in almost every language, the sound of it so suggestive of sensuous pleasure and intimate communication, that it barely needs definition anywhere.But ... a confitería?When I first heard the word I thought it referred to jams or jellies, as in the French confiture. Or to a candy or pastry shop, as in the standard Spanish word confitería. But I was in Buenos Aires at the time, and in that city a confitería is far, far more than what's contained in either of those definitions. It is the very essence of what a café should be.I knew this the moment I first walked into one. The confitería has everything that its French or Italian compatriots provide, plus much else. It is a café and a bistro, an ice cream shop and a bakery, a wine bar and a beer hall, all in the same very well-appointed, light-filled room. Sometimes it will even include tango, a feature of which very few cafés in the world can boast. A morning can be spent in a confitería in conversation over a sultry omelette or the smallest, most delicious of croissants, called in Buenos Aires medialunas (i.e. halfmoons). A confession of love or angry disavowal can be made. A plate of fresh fish and potatoes can be yours right away. An afternoon can be spent in the beginning of an affair. Lovely pastas pass by on trays carried by thoroughly engaging waiters. An evening's solitary reading of a novel can be enhanced by talk over a good steak about that novel with someone you've never met before. Customers come and go. The traffic passes by outside while the observant patron reads or talks, asks for another coffee or an ice cream. (Argentines militantly insist that their ice cream is the best in the world, and I don't argue with them. The dairy products in general of Argentina are among the best I've ever had, and I think that's due to the fact that the entire cattle population of the country is still range-fed.) A glass of Mendoza malbec is just right with a triple, a sandwich of fine ham and Argentine Swiss cheese, brought to you once again by a most attentive waiter secure in his profession. If the confitería is the essence of the idea of a café, the Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires is the essence of the confitería. The Avenida de Mayo is a major thoroughfare in Buenos Aires. A shopping street, it is almost always glutted with automobiles. Its sidewalks are lined with deciduous trees that, during the summer months offer relief from the humidity that rises up from the Plate River. In winter, the street reminds me of the many paintings by Impressionists like Monet and Caillebotte, of rain in Paris. The streets in those paintings are slick, the trees having lost their leaves, their branches reaching into the sky like broken fingers. There is nonetheless considerable warmth in the paintings, because the Parisians are so devoted to light and color, even in the dead of winter. As the light fades in late afternoon, Buenos Aires, like Paris, gains color with electric light, making winter night-time Buenos Aires one of the most visually arresting cities in the world. The trouble is that Buenos Aires didn't have the artists that Paris had. But it did have the Cafe Tortoni at Avenida de Mayo 825, a place that Toulouse Lautrec, Degas or Renoir would have understood and cherished. It used to be that, no matter the season or time of day, the quiet of the Tortoni's interior belied the swirl of traffic outside. But lately it has become a favorite on the tourist scene. The Tortoni has a daily smattering of these, usually in the afternoons ... porcine, slovenly wanderers from everywhere, in hiking shoes or sandals, floppy shorts and T-shirts that advertise American cell phone companies, German football teams or meaningless software products. So I advise visiting the Tortoni in the morning before ten o'clock, when its more traditional Buenos Aires clientele is having early coffee. Another good time to visit here is mid-winter (i.e. June through August), when the Americans and Europeans have rumbled into Saint-Tropez or Yellowstone.The Tortoni itself barely notices the tourist trade, though. The real clientele here are the porteños, citizens of Buenos Aires who one senses have been frequenting the Tortoni for most of their lives. They read the papers in the morning light coming through the large windowed doors of the café, light that spills across the tables, warming the disputatious information in the newspapers in a quiet glow. This is a café in the grand style, founded in 1858 by a Frenchman named Tounan and named after the famous café in Paris. It is filled with nineteenth century French and Italian woodwork, with one of the most beautifully ornate bars one could hope to see. Beveled mirrors make the café seem larger than it is, even though it is already quite a sizable room, as do the crystal chandeliers, of which there are many. There is a good deal of brass as well in the fixtures, and the café is dotted with glass cases that contain the memorabilia of the many writers, politicians, intellectuals, singers and other luminaries who have made this their usual café. For contemplative and intimate talk, it is a café without equal, and the conversations are many. The Tortoni is a place where business is done at lunch between portentous-looking bankers and lawyers, where directors and money people talk about the next film project or where a mother and her children will pause for an ice cream or a sweet. Wine fuels the talk here in the late afternoon or evening, and that talk has come over the years from such as Federico García Lorca, Robert Duval, Carlos Gardel, Jorge Luis Borges, Artur Rubinstein, Luciano Pavarotti, Hilary Rodham Clinton, and King Juan Carlos of Spain. Rubinstein even once played the piano here! Lovers meet here too, frequently, over a couple of cafes dobles and the fluttering intertwine of fingers and whispered words. Indeed love appears as a distinct possibility at The Tortoni simply upon walking into the place. A coffee here is much more affordable to an illicitly amorous couple than an afternoon's hotel room and its hour of hastened caresses. The final denouement may not take place in the café, but almost everything leading up to it does. Tango is the blood with which Buenos Aires pulses, and great writing adds to that blood. The Tortoni has been a place for both, sometimes separately, sometimes in concert with each other. One of the most famous meetings here took place in 1927 between the Italian playwright Luigi Pirandello and the legendary tango composer and singer Carlos Gardel. Pirandello, the author of Six Characters In Search Of An Author and many other plays, novels, short stories and essays, was an intellectual. One need only look at the sheer bulk of the work he produced to realize that this was a serious man, and according to eyewitness reports from the Tortoni on that evening, he was also distant and cheerless. He was being feted at the café by the local literati when the celebrated Gardel arrived. Gardel was a very different sort of fellow from Pirandello. Like Pirandello a man of the theater, he was a performer, not a writer. So his efforts were public and very elegantly flashy. Carlos Gardel was one of the best-dressed men of his time. When he went on tour to Great Britain, he regularly shopped on Savile Row with his friend the Prince of Wales, later to be King Edward VIII. He was a friend of the great of every calling. Charlie Chaplin was a fan. Enrico Caruso told him that he, Gardel, was the opera star's favorite singer.Gardel had come to the Tortoni that evening in order to meet Pirandello. He arrived in a Packard limousine dressed in his best, wearing one of the signature fedora hats that were specially made for him in London. He was accompanied by two of his guitarists and, taking the three chairs immediately in front of the Italian playwright, they sat down and performed several of Gardel's most popular tangos. The hundreds of onlookers in the cafe burst into great, spontaneous applause upon the completion of each number, the sort of applause that greeted Gardel everywhere he went. Pirandello looked on, his white beard motionless in the glitter.When Gardel was finished, he grabbed Pirandello's hand, shook it with great enthusiasm and waved his guitarists out the door to his limousine,that had remained waiting at the curb. The Packard disappeared into the night, Gardel on his way to another club, another assignation.After the applause and shouting died down, Pirandello turned to one of the others at his table and asked, "Who was that?""Well, señor," the man replied, a little nonplussed by the question. "It was Gardel!""Who's he?""The greatest performer of tango in the world!" the man said."Ah!" Pirandello sighed. He sat back in his chair, waving a languid hand before his face. "Bravo ..." he whispered. Gardel died on January 24, 1935 in a disastrous plane crash, having gone against his own better judgment, the only time he'd ever been on an airplane. He'd reluctantly agreed to the flight because of a must appearance that his advisers had insisted was essential to the tour he was on at the time. Tango lives for betrayal. It is a celebration of private pain and individual sorrow. Gardel sung all that, and his death itself was in a way a tango ... a man betrayed by his friends, who lost his life with a single gesture that went terribly wrong. And what of Edward VIII and his tango? His disgrace when he abdicated the English throne on December 10, 1936 would probably have been more understandable to Gardel than his ascendancy to the throne. The King's embarrassment would have allowed Gardel to discuss a lost youth, a misspent life, frustration in love, all the things about which tangos are composed. A pleasure-seeking, occasionally witty nobleman, the Duke of Windsor became an icon for squandered opportunities, living a very desultory life, more or less rejected by his family, in the capitals of the world, awash in wealth. In terms of personal style, he was much like Gardel, except that Gardel was not rejected. He had been born illegitimately and had gained his first small fame, later to be worldwide, as a street singer in Buenos Aires. As such he had not always had a great deal to lose, even though he became a very wealthy man. The Duke of Windsor did have much to lose, and he lost almost all of it ... except for the few yachts he owned, the many houses and apartments around the world, the estates and limousines and of course his lovely American wife. Gardel, on the other hand, did lose everything ... the ultimate tango.His spirit breathes in the Café Tortoni, in the very coffee you drink, the sweet you have for breakfast, in the murmuring of the other customers and the soft morning light coming from the Avenida de Mayo. The photos, paintings and plaques that carry his image and that are hung in various places throughout the café commemorate the many hours he spent there talking, laughing and, of course, singing. A great café is always truly of its own setting. It represents the place, and the custom and style of the place. Perhaps the finest tribute to the Café Tortoni can be found in the words of the celebrated Argentine linguist and writer José Gobello who observed that you can find in the Café Tortoni the entire city of Buenos Aires.

Terence Clarke is a San Francisco novelist, journalist, and film maker who writes about the arts.

The Great Cafés

Terence Clarke — Mon, 13 Aug 2007 21:07:30 EDT

Upon the drinking of a cup of coffee, Balzac wrote, "everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages." Less militantly, the young girl Lieschen responds to her father Herr Schlendrian, in the libretto to Bach's "Coffee Cantata", "Dear father, don't be so strict! If I can't have my little demi-tasse of coffee three times a day, I'm just a dried-up piece of roast goat." The cantata was premiered at Zimmerman's Coffee House in Leipzig in 1732. Turk's Head, a coffee house in the Strand in London, was the site of many humorous conversations between Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, the actor David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Sir Joshua Reynolds the painter, from 1763 to 1783. Other members of the circle were Thomas Percy, historian Edward Gibbon, and economist Adam Smith. Parts of these conversations were immortalized in The Life of Samuel Johnson by James Boswell, considered by most to be the greatest biography of all time.Ingrid Bergman, her eyes glistening with excitement and remembered love for Humphrey Bogart, says to a flirtatious Sidney Greenstreet, "Thank you for your coffee, seignor. I shall miss that when we leave Casablanca." A certain kind of writer, I believe, was put on this earth to sit in cafes. I am one of them. I have written large parts of several books in numerous cafes around the world, and I find in such places a very welcoming ambiance for reading, conversation, contemplation and, sometimes, even the beginning of love. Of course I find coffee there as well.So when I began thinking about great cafes, I was already warmly comfortable with the idea of any café. I've enjoyed hundreds.But a great café... Great cafés are great in part because of what's happened there. Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse in Abchurch Lane, London in the 1690s served a clientele that underwrote insurance for ships and their cargoes. Though all he did was to provide a place for these transactions to be made, his name was immortalized by one of those businesses, the founders of which called it Lloyd's of London. At the Tontine Coffee House at the corner of Wall and Water Streets in New York, an upstairs room was rented in 1793 so that brokers dealing shares in various business concerns could trade in a quiet, centrally located and more reserved atmosphere than that outside under the buttonwood trees, in the open air and muddy streets. It was not until several years later that that "market" moved to even more staid quarters up the block a few doors, to be renamed "The New York Stock Exchange".In contemporary times, you visit the Dôme in Paris and you imagine the scratch of Hemingway's pen making its way across the slowly diminishing white of the sheet of paper before him. At the Procope, also in Paris, you enjoy the fact that this is the first true café in the world in the modern sense of the idea, founded in 1686 by Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli. So, in this café you get to hear the scratch of Voltaire's pen, and occasionally even that of Benjamin Franklin. You go to the Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires and you envision -- in the lush remains of the aerated milk down the side of the ceramic coffee cup -- the tangos that the immortal Carlos Gardel sang for the great but uncomprehending playwright Luigi Pirandello one night in 1933, the year before Pirandello won the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the Caffe Trieste in San Francisco, you sit among the lost generation of aging beatnik patrons and hear the declaiming voices of the now long-gone Ginsberg, Burroughs, and Kerouac. In such cafes, the color, the odors, the pleasure are all augmented by the kinds of conversations that have taken place in them and the identities of those having the conversations. History warms the room and gives the very coffee itself a kind of luxurious glow, a different taste altogether.Great cafes are, each one of them, entirely unique. No two great cafes are alike, and it may be that the elements that make one café great do not exist in another great cafe.But there are a few criteria that I think every great café must have. Without at least a majority of these, a café simply doesn't make it. The requirements are pedestrian enough, obvious beyond words. However, given the corporatization of the world in recent decades, globalization, the bottom line as the only line, etc., it turns out that most cafes worldwide are out of the running. Almost none of them stands a chance.Coffees and teas must be served in ceramic cups, on saucers, with a small metal spoon where required.Other liquids, such as water, must be served in glass containers.Food must be served on ceramic plates with proper silverware and a napkin.There must be comfortable chairs on which to sit and a comfortable table at which to sit.The café need not be open twenty-four hours a day, but it must be open in the morning. Being open very late into the night is also preferred, since late hours foster boisterous talk. There should be no ambiance of hurried quickness in the partaking of food and drink. That is, no pressure on the patron to get his order and get the hell out.The descriptions of the fare and personnel should be made in the proper common vernacular of whatever city in question, with no cutesy-pie made-up marketing jargon. For example you mustn't rename a cappuccino as something else simply in order to differentiate your product. And of course great cafes don't require ... in fact they eschew ... the idea that the person behind the counter be called a barista, a word that doesn't exist, or at least shouldn't.Otherwise there are no rigid laws, no bar examinations to pass, no board requirements. There are simply the grand, mysterious combinations of elements -- the long ago whisperings wherein great history was plotted, the thrill of a famous caress beneath the table, a great tranquil river running by outside beneath the trees, the finally completed immortal poem, the startling discovery drawn up on a napkin, the great, great cup of coffee -- that elevate some few cafés to a place of excellence and pleasure that almost no others can hope to achieve.Thus, here begins my exploration of cafes -- of great cafes. I have my pen and paper with me, and will be writing -- in occasional articles -- about the ones I find.

Terence Clarke is a San Francisco novelist, journalist, and film maker who writes about the arts.