April 9th, 2007
Milk tea at a cha chaan teng in Hong Kong. Photo by Lisi Tang
It was the Saturday before the Lunar New Year and The Boss was crazy. People crammed inside the small bakery that fronts this old Chinatown restaurant, buying cakes, buns and cookies. Others stood around, waiting for their names to be called so they could finally be seated. Hungry, we pushed through the crowd and gave our name to the host. Then we waited. My girlfriend’s sister decided to buy a box of cocktail and curry buns. As she walked towards the counter, I stared at a large painting of a rosy-cheeked, contented old man that loomed over the bakery, flanked on both sides by festive red New Year banners with gold script. His long white beard flowed towards large pots of gold coins that rested at his feet.
“Who’s that?” I whispered to my girlfriend, Laine.
“Choi Sun wah,” she whispered back. “The, uh, god of wealth.”
When our name was called, we went to the rear of the bustling restaurant where there was a long dining hall with four rows of booths. My eyes wandered to the back of the restaurant, A strangely dour-looking jiu choi mao, or lucky cat, was perched on a ledge near the ceiling, its paw solemnly raised to beckon good fortune. As I stared at the cat, a remarkably fast-moving waitress placed four glasses of tea on the table and slapped down our menus before running off. I opened mine, stomach growling. My eyes widened as I perused the dozens of items: ox-tongue spaghetti, lovebird fried rice, baked Portuguese chicken, Hong Kong milk tea. Ah yes, this is what I had come for: cha chaan teng food.
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January 24th, 2007
El Fishawy is the best known café in Cairo
and a favourite of Nobel Prize winner Naguib Mahfouz
Mention Cairo, and the first things that come to mind are the pyramids. Why do I consider this unfortunate? Because the pyramids are a remnant of a dead civilization, and Cairo today is a living city of 16 million people. Let me suggest a better symbol: the cafés of Khan-el-Khalili, a living microcosm of Egypt’s metropolis.
Cairo’s cafés are many things at once. Sometimes, they have the social buzz of a nightclub or pub. You can often count on the Egyptian smoking a shisha next to you to strike up a conversation. I even saw some French tourists at a nearby table who seemed to be flirting with two Egyptian women in conservative Muslim headgear. Somewhere beyond the shisha haze was a family in party hats celebrating their kid’s birthday surrounded by golden trays crammed with large frothy milkshakes. A café isn’t a café without, well, introspective café types: reading, quietly sipping their dark mint tea, or scribbling away.
Cafés are habitually doorless and windowless. The interiors spill out onto the streets and the suq spills into the cafés. Cairo’s most famous café, the Fishawy, is a series of mirrors and ornate doorframes crammed into a through street. The street is used by shopkeepers, trinket vendors, and pedestrians, who brush against the tables. Sometimes the people-watching seems a little too intimate but this is Cairo: dense, chaotic, and wonderful.
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November 23rd, 2006
On a recent evening, I sat in La Croissanterie, a small café on Ste. Catherine Street in the west end of downtown Montreal. Before me was a café au lait and a warm apple turnover. Next to me sat a mousy English student whose notes were sprawled across the table. La Croissanterie is a strange little place, its wood-panelled, green-accented interior lost between an alpine lodge and a kitschy casse-croûte, but since I started working nearby earlier this month, it has quickly become my favourite downtown coffee shop.
Part of the reason for that is La Croissanterie’s unabashed, endearing hominess. Its mostly anglophone clientele, a mix of students and random downtowners, lounge in their seats as if they were in a basement rec room. The menu is decidedly quaint, with comfort-food staples like pâté chinois (a Quebec version of shepherd’s pie) cozying up to the café’s namesake: fresh, gloriously crispy croissants baked on-site throughout the day by the café’s friendly immigrant owners.
Another part of what attracts me to this unassuming café is, quite simply, its good value. In my years of drinking caffeinated beverages in Montreal, I’ve come to the conclusion that there is a definite correlation between high-quality coffee shops and low prices. La Croissanterie is no exception. A mug of café au lait—the espresso rich and smooth, the milk thick and frothy—costs only $2.25, tax included. A croissant costs just one dollar. Best of all is the daily special: a ham, cheese and egg sandwich on a croissant, with a café au lait, for $4.25. My mouth waters just thinking about it.
The strange decor, the relaxed atmosphere, the good value—all of it give La Croissanterie the air of a throwback to the days before downtown Montreal was monopolized by bland chain cafés. More
October 17th, 2006
Sign in the parking lot of the Spiderhouse Café, Austin
On a blog dedicated to urbanism, it might seem sacrilegious to sing the praises of a coffeehouse that has its very own parking lot. But this is Texas we’re talking about, and allowances must be made.
More to the point, this is Austin we’re talking about — a low-slung, laid-back, liberal bastion in the middle of the lone star state — where the café is more central to community life than in any other North American city I have been to. The people of Seattle and Vancouver may love their coffee, but the people of Austin live at the café.
The Spiderhouse is located in an old house on the border between the university campus and the granola-crunching residential enclave of Hyde Park. It epitomizes the only civic movement to which Austin’s hippies and hipsters alike have dedicated themselves without reservation — an endearingly quixotic campaign to confront the forces of corporate homogenization and “Keep Austin Weird.”
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October 13th, 2006
Fair trade coffee has entered the mainstream. Far from its old image as the fringe product that one could only obtain through a shifty-eyed neo-hippie local roaster, fair trade coffee is now recognized by the majority of the world’s large coffee corporations, and some coffeehouses and roasters have worked with the movement to succeed in business while spreading awareness about socially-responsible consumer products.
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October 8th, 2006
Trying to explain why the Hungarian Pastry Shop is invariably staffed by Ethiopians, or why it sells more Austrian than Hungarian delicacies, is as much an exercise in futility as attempting to dissuade the socialists who scribble incessantly on the cafe’s bathroom wall their clarion calls to revolution. To be sure, were a socialist revolution to break out anywhere in Morningside Heights, uptown Manhattan at its most, perhaps, uptight, it would probably be here and not in the myriad Starbucks lining nearby Broadway. Still, frequenting the Hungarian can be an exercise in observing how gentrification can affect a neighborhood as much internally as imposes pressures from the outside.
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October 6th, 2006
Okay, so it’s more like morning tea than coffee. There are two different kinds: the first copper samovar contains the chai found all over South Asia — milky, black, strong, and spiced with cardamom and ginger. The other samovar contains Peshawari kawa, or green tea spiced with cardamom (and… is that nutmeg?). The small pots are mostly sold to other shopkeepers, but there are a few benches to the side to drink on-site. The chai-wallah (tea maker) is constantly busy. He bobs around on haunches and clutches onto the chain to maintain balance: a heaping scoop of sugar starts the mix, followed by the concentrated mixture in the samovar, topped off with some water. A spoon goes clink-clink, and off to the next one. Every so often, a young boy pops up with a tray of empty pots collected around the bazaar, rinses them with hot water, and throws them at the feet of the chai-wallah. Oh, and did I mention I could go for a pot right about now…
October 2nd, 2006
Morning Coffee is a new series that will focus on cafés around the world.
Caffè Beano in late December, Calgary
Date muffins. I am craving date muffins, because there are few places in this world that make date muffins as good as those at Caffè Beano. But Caffè Beano is 4,090 kilometres from my front door. Google Maps tells me it will take 50 hours of driving to get there. I can’t even imagine how long that would take to walk.
I live in Montreal, you see, but Caffè Beano is in Calgary, tucked away between an ice cream parlour and a barber’s shop near 17th Avenue. I grew up in Calgary and, whenever I go back to visit family, I make a daily pilgrimmage to this small coffee shop with its awkward layout and black-and-white tiled floors. Its prices are reasonable ($2.50 for a café au lait; $1.75 for those date muffins) but that isn’t what compels me to visit. It isn’t the ambiance, either, the warm, convivial atmosphere that spills onto the sidewalk outside. No, the real reason I go to Caffè Beano is nostalgia.
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