Anyone in the know can tell the state of farming by the number of half-tons pulled up at coffee row and how long they stay there. In our part of the world, there have been a lot of half tons around the cafe lately and they’ve been staying there for quite a while.
Drinking coffee is an institution in our society.
Author Margaret Visser, in her award winning book The Rituals of Dinner, has this to say about the popular drink: “Coffee plays an important role for us as part of an initiation ritual, helping us to cross over the boundaries which we have made increasingly strong between work and leisure, home and “out.” We take coffee “to wake us up in the morning” and to set us up for day’s work…People afraid of not getting a good night’s sleep if they drink coffee…may be provided with coffee deprived of its caffeine: the taste, the color, the social symbolism of the drink have become so important to them that they settle for coffee without what makes it (physically speaking) coffee.”
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More than 400 years ago, the coffee house was a popular institution.
It was 1554 in Constantinople when the first coffee house was established, coffee having made its way there from Abyssinia via Persia, Arabia, Egypt and Syria.
The first coffee house in England was opened in Oxford in the 1600s. It wasn’t long before they were popular across Europe and in Colonial America. In the absence of newspapers, these “houses” were centres for spreading news and gossip about the happenings of the day.
Today in Canada, we are seeing a resurgence of the coffee house.
Unlike the brew we tend to drink on “coffee row” and in our own homes, these new style coffee houses have a culture and a language all their own.
You don’t order coffee, you have something called caffee latte, espresso or iced cappuccino. You get less caffeine than in your coffee row cup, but more calories. You get ambience, but you don’t get a lot of conversation with the other patrons.
These coffee bars with their specialty coffees and fancy decor are still largely an urban institution and will probably stay that way. And, while the term coffee bar may have connotations of the coffee houses of old, it’s really coffee row in the rural cafe which is carrying on the coffee house tradition of being a social centre for the dissemination of news and the exchange of views.
