Drinking Coffee the French Way

On the menu of a French café the same coffee sometimes appears three times, with three prices: at the counter, in the room, on the terrace. Nothing requires this, it is simply allowed, and anyone who does it has to post the prices before a customer orders. A decree from 1987 goes as far as the size of the lettering: at least one and a half centimetres, outside the building the list of the most common drinks with quantity and price, inside the full menu.

At the counter the espresso is usually cheapest. Trade figures for this year put it at 1.40 to 1.80 euros in mid-sized towns and 1.70 to 2.20 in large cities, against 1.80 to 3 euros in the room or on the terrace in the provinces and 2.50 to 4 in Paris.

What you pay for is the spot.

For the terrace you can do the arithmetic: put tables on the pavement and you are occupying public ground, which in many French towns needs permission and costs the business an annual fee to the town. For the room the surcharge is harder to account for, and it is on the menu all the same.

At the Zinc

The counter is called the zinc, although the dictionary says it was rarely made of zinc and mostly of copper. The word stayed. A noisette is an espresso with a cloud of milk, a crème is coffee with a little milk or cream, and petit noir is colloquial for nothing more than a cup of coffee.

Outside the building, next to the café noir, hangs what the decree takes to be the most common drinks: draught beer and bottled beer, fruit juice, lemonade, mineral water, the aniseed apéritif, plus the dish of the day and a sandwich. What goes on that list was settled by the legislator, not by the owner.

Mineral water is on it, tap water is not. Since a decree of 1967 water and bread have counted as part of the laid table, in a café as in a restaurant, and if you order something you can ask for a carafe of tap water without paying for it. And since the start of 2022 the business has to state visibly that you are allowed to ask, on the menu or somewhere in the room.

For dessert there is the café gourmand, an espresso with several tiny desserts on a board. A restaurant chain came up with it in the eighties, having copied what the expensive places had long been doing, which was to put a few mignardises out with the coffee.

What this looks like in Italy and Spain is in A Minute at the Bar and Drinking Coffee the Spanish Way.

The Bowl in the Morning

At breakfast the coffee comes in a bol, which the dictionary calls a hemispherical bowl, bigger than a cup and without a handle, and the tartine gets dipped into it, a slice of bread with butter or jam. Duralex, founded in 1945 and at home in the Loiret, makes them from tempered glass by a process Saint-Gobain developed in the thirties: heat to 600 degrees, then cool very fast, which leaves the glass twice as impact resistant as ordinary glass. The manufacturer writes itself that a handle is not really meant to be there and only goes on so you do not burn your fingers.

The Coffee Bar has five boards at uneven spacings: twice 35 centimetres, then 60, and 25 at the top. The cup rail hangs from one of the boards. A bowl does not hang there, it has no handle, it stands on the board.

The cafés themselves are getting fewer. In the sixties France had around 200,000 bistros; in 2014 the statistical office counted 34,669. That same office kept an official average price for the tasse de café simple au comptoir, the plain cup at the counter, for years (converted, 0.74 euros for 1992 and 0.98 for 1999). Then the office stopped keeping it.