“Hello, my name is Gary and I’m addicted to coffeehouses.”* If I were in a twelve-step program for such an addiction, that would be my introduction.
A good coffeehouse provides a nice visual and seating ambience with the hum of floating conversations mixed with sounds and smells of the barista art. The lure is strong to a place serving excellent coffee and tempting baked goods while offering community, a safe place to sketch or write, or just slowly sip hot java while thinking about anything, everything, or nothing.
History
Coffeehouses’ appeal goes back centuries. Kiva Han, in Constantinople (Istanbul), Turkey, was the first recorded evidence in 1475 of a public coffeehouse. Europe’s first appeared in Vienna around 1529, encouraged by the then-new trend of adding cream and sugar to coffee.
Despite thinking Britain is a country of tea drinkers, coffee culture began there early as well. An early English merchant imported Turkish goods, including coffee. He spurred a coffeehouse boom when a few of his servants left him with some coffee to set up The Turk’s Head in 1652. Interestingly, the concept of tipping first appeared in an English coffeehouse where they wrote on a jar “To Insure Prompt Service.” Soon shortened to just “Tips”, the acronym stuck into modern times.
Britains would refer to such places as “penny universities,” since that was the coffee price and most of its clientele were upper-class businessmen. From there, coffeehouses opened up across Europe, eventually coming to the Americas. The dumping of tea during the Boston Tea Party, and the subsequent boycott of English tea, pushed the colonists to drink coffee instead.
Fun facts
Politics – Since the 1700s, coffeehouses have been hotbeds of discussions (sometimes including radical/revolutionary planning). From France to Colombia and finally to America, such places were incubators for artists, intellectuals, and politicals.
Espresso machines – Realizing coffee made workers more productive, Italian Luigi Bezerra in 1901 invented a self-serve espresso machine. Later in 1946, the company Gaggia introduced a commercial piston-based espresso machine and started the widespread public coffeehouse use of espresso and coffee variants.
Prohibition – The crackdown on liquor and moonshine during this period in U.S. history caused people to switch to coffee, and the dark elixir became a favorite drink.
Beat generation – This 1950s group of writers and poets, a new generation confronting cultural norms, often met in coffeehouses. Ginsberg and Kerouac’s favorite New York City coffeehouse was Greenwich Village’s Caffe´ Reggio, one of the first American coffeehouses to offer cappuccinos.
Vietnam War era – Protesters meeting in U.S. coffeehouses were so common that these meeting places earned the nickname “G.I. Cafes.”
New York City – In the 1960s one chain dominated public coffeehouses: Chock Full O’ Nuts, serving a combo of a cup of coffee and a muffin.
Starbucks – 1971 saw the quiet launch of a small coffeehouse in Seattle. Few predicted this chain would become the world’s largest coffeehouse chain.
Back to the present
I’ve frequented coffeehouses and cafes for decades across the U.S. and occasionally beyond its borders. Before then, I was an avowed tea drinker, slowly seduced over time by the aromatic black brew with its extra caffeine kick. Whether drinking coffee or tea, such places were my choice away from home or office to think, work, or write.
Escaping from distractions and todos (and honey dos!) seems to boost productivity for me. I wonder if my prior soul bearer was a nomad wandering from one refuge to another, in search of peace or good coffee? I’ve always had a small home study or studio, yet I seem to write more freely in a coffeehouse. And even when living in a camper van wandering America, I’d often stop in small towns at curious or cute coffeehouses to enjoy the local brews and community.
I’m not a fan of Starbucks coffee or its shops as places to write or work, but sometimes they are the only option. On my first visit to New York City well before Covid, I was looking forward to finding quirky local coffeehouses. To my dismay, Starbucks had already invaded, replacing most of the local coffeehouses. Starbucks occupied THREE of the four corners near Times Square at one street crossing. Made little sense, but each had lines and were busy.
Good coffeehouse criteria
I’ve explored many of my local coffeehouses and settled on a short list of four or five to rotate visits, each meeting most of my criteria:
Good to great coffee – I don’t drink the fancy coffee concoctions, but go black with a tiny bit of cream (less than a teaspoon and no sweetener). So, coffee quality is important.
Ambience – Conducive to work, enjoyment, and if possible, visually interesting. Prefer ones with tables spread out versus a small room with crammed-together seating (more typical here the closer I get to the University campus). Covid-19 times taught me the importance of airflow/table separation inside such places.
Good to great baked goods – Not store-bought but locally made with hopefully some savory options.
Access – Available free parking or an easy bus ride matters when one spends close to three hours in a coffeehouse. Two of my favorite places are a few blocks walk from the bus transit center in nearby Ypsilanti. They are my go-to places when I want to let someone else do the driving.
Bonus points – Meal foods (especially non-baked-goods breakfast options), free coffee refills, or outside seating.
Productivity
Not every coffeehouse visit yields gold when writing, planning, being productive, or whatever the reasons for the visit. Often it’s nice just to get out of the house and go somewhere to sit and think with a good cup of coffee or sometimes a good book.
Sometimes I’ll get distracted down a rabbit hole (thank you very much, Internet), or my writing expectations were too high. While I grimace at the Internet’s “plague” of social media and what it’s done to many people’s ability to have a face-to-face conversation, I marvel at the pure magic of working remotely and connecting online.
Our modern lives are like washer rinse cycles: spinning so fast we get caught up in the whirl. We rarely slow down, and a coffeehouse visit offers a chance to relax and ease up.
I’ve visited so many coffeehouses over the decades that you’d think I’d have enough data to predict when a visit will be productive. That icing on the cake continues to elude me. Sometimes my writing muse fails to show, perhaps because she slept in, working off a hangover from a muse party the night before. I imagine a group of muses get together, drink too much, then start griping about working too hard because their creatives are so lame! Blowing off stress, muse-style, probably.
There are moments I think having a home study or studio is a waste of space, and instead go every day to different local coffeehouses to work. Three reasons that’s flawed thinking:
If/when another pandemic like Covid-19 hits,
Coffeehouse escapes are a treat, which might fade to the mundane if I did that all the time, and
My waistline couldn’t take the hits!
Parting thoughts
I probably frequented one place in Ohio way too often during my last years living there doing the corporate worky-work thing before retiring. At this small coffeehouse, I seemed to channel Norm, the much-beloved character from the TV series Cheers. When I walked in, the baristas would shout “Gary!”
Plus, like Norm, I had a favorite spot: a table in one of the bay windows at the front. If regulars were sitting there, and I walked in, they’d often get up without my prompting and remark, “We’ll move so you can have your table.”
Respect. Norm-style. But still embarrassed me a bit every time.
* A note about the twelve-step comment at the beginning. No offense meant or intention to trivialize the seriousness of addictions requiring such programs. Those who go through those programs and come out clean are heroes to self and society, at least in my mind.
Musings by Gary Varner. Always free. Subscribe for fresh, emailed new articles.