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".
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