The best cafés in Paris - Citimarks
citinotes

The café

Waiter at the Café du Marché, Paris.
Man sitting at a Parisian café reading newspaper

Citinotes

"In just one week, at a café, one can learn more about the life and customs of Paris, than spending a year in an English hotel."
Donald Grant Mitchell, Fresh Gleanings, University of Michigan Library, 1847.
chapter 1

First Class Café

In first-class cafés, the dining rooms are arranged with great elegance, even splendor. Pilasters of marble, arranged to produce an effect, and other ornaments are reflected by large mirrors arranged tastefully around the room.

On one side there is a high seat, with an elegant desk or counter in front of it, frequently adorned with a hanging canopy. Normally a woman sits there, wisely chosen for her good looks. She is the genius who presides over the shop, repressing any irregularity or indecency of her hosts with the soft -but effective- power of her presence. She controls the waiters in the accomplishments of their tasks; she also receives the change from the patrons with extraordinary grace and responds to any observation they might make with accomplished politeness.

Donald Grant Mitchell,
Fresh Gleanings, University of Michigan Library, 1847.

The entrance of the Café Les Deux Magots, Paris

Les Deux Magots, an iconic Parisian café, took its name by two chinese figurines that once adorned the sign of a novelty store located on the site of the current café. Source: Sortir à Paris.

Waiters preparing their trays at the Café Les Deux Magots, Paris

The waiters are traditionally dressed in a black log and a white apron, and the pastry service is done on a tray. Hot chocolate, their signature beverage, is made from chocolate bars. Source: Sortir à Paris.

Decor details inside the Les Deux Magots Café, Paris

The café became a pole of attraction for artists and intellectuals, such as André Breton and his fellow Surrealists, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway and Jean-Paul Sartre. Source: Sortir à Paris.

chapter 2

Café around the clock

(The café) is the arena of the public life of Paris: what Wall Street is to strictly commercial people, the café is for the Frenchman. There, the politics and the amusements of the day are put in discussion. Each table has its group, and the conversations are held so discreetly that the nearest neighbors are not disturbed […]

Donald Grant Mitchell,
Fresh Gleanings, University of Michigan Library, 1847.

(In the café,) the Parisian takes his chocolate and his newspaper, his half-cup and his cigar, his mistress and his ice cream. The provincial takes his lunch and National (note:a French journal), his absinth drink and his wife. Even the Englishman takes his Galignani (note: some book from a famous English language bookstore) and his eggs, the German his beer and his pipe.

After midday, the little half-cup tends to prevail over the breakfast bowl, and during the next three hours there is a noticeable decrease of visitors. […] Then appear the old unhappy singles and the married men in quarrel with their wives.

As the hours pass, the after-dinner idlers arrive; old ladies with little white dogs prance around as they are looking for a table and take their coffee dice. The seats outside fill up; we laugh, we put ourselves at ease, we sip, and we talk. The lamps are turned on. Young men order ice creams, old men order punch. One can hear the clinking of dominoes at half of the tables.

The clock strikes nine, ten, eleven and twelve o’clock in the Parisian world. Buses have stopped running; waiters put the shutters down. People start to leave, going back, not to their homes -there is no such word in their vocabulary-, but chez eux.

Donald Grant Mitchell,
Fresh Gleanings, University of Michigan Library, 1847.

Couple sitting at the terrace of a Parisian café
Couple talking at a Parisian café
Lady writing at a Parisian café
chapter 3

How to behave at a Parisian café

When you enter one of these cafés you will see, here or there, a person standing around in a white apron; he has a mustache and in his left hand he holds a coffee pot; leaning gracefully to his right, he is reading his favorite newspaper; he is the waiter. When you scream waiter!  three times, the lady of the office will ring a small doorbell and immediately remove this server from his post. If you have a very distinguished appearance, she will let you scream only two times; if you have an embroidered cardigan and sideburns and look like a lord, she won’t even let you scream at all. […]

The waiter, while bringing you the change, is always waiting for a tip. If you leave a penny, he will just tilt his head; if you leave two, he will add a thank you; finally, if you generously leave three, not only will he bow deeply, muttering thanks, but he will also open the door for you. As you leave, you will look at the lady and raise your hat: the calm serenity of her response to your civility informs you that she has greeted half of the coffee drinkers in Europe.

Donald Grant Mitchell,
Fresh Gleanings, University of Michigan Library, 1847.

The terrace of a Parisian café at Ile Saint-Louis
Waiter taking order at a Parisian café-restaurant in Montmartre
Waiter with tray at a Parisian café
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chapter 4

The waiter

Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick, he bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.

Finally, there he returns, trying to imitate the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope walker […]. His whole behavior looks like an act.

He applies himself to chaining his movements as they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he instills the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things in himself. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing?

He is playing a waiter in a café. There is nothing here that should surprise us. This is a game of detection and investigation. The child plays with his body to explore it, to study it meticulously; the waiter in the café plays with his condition in order to materialize it.

Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes towards the patrons with a step a little too quick, he bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer.

This obligation is not different from what all tradesmen must deliver. Their social status is one of ceremony, the public demands that they deliver that status as a ceremony; there is the dance of the grocer, of the tailor, of the auctioneer, by which they try to persuade their clientele that they are nothing but a grocer, an auctioneer, a tailor. A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not only a grocer. Society demands that he limits himself to his function as a grocer […]. Indeed many precautions are taken in order to imprison a man in what he is, as if we live in a state of perpetual fear that he might escape from it, that he might break away and suddenly escape from his condition.

Jean-Paul Sartre,
L’Être et le Néant, NRF – Gallimard, 1943.

Waiters helping each other at Parisian café
Waiters talking to each other at Parisian café
Waiters serving at Parisian café

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