The water starts to hiss, the grinder is the only sound in the flat for a few seconds, and while you wait you look out of the window without seeing anything. Then the cup, with both hands. For a minute the day is not there yet.
Mostly this happens in the part of the kitchen least meant for it. The machine stands next to the sink because there was room, the beans in a cupboard, the filter in a drawer, the favourite cup somewhere among the others. You only notice once you have made coffee somewhere else. In a bar in Bologna, say, where the man behind the counter was done in thirty seconds because he never had to turn around for anything: the machine in front of him, the cups on the tray above it, the sugar beside him, the saucer in his hand.
A place that belongs to the coffee
The Coffee Bar is that counter, only at home and for one person. The machine stands at hip height, where you work it without bending down. Above it the beans, the pot, the jar of sugar nobody takes any more and that stays anyway. On the cup rail hang the cups you actually use, handles to the front. Down in the box lies what the morning needs and nobody has to see: filters, descaler, the packet that is still sealed. The kitchen stays the same, only the route gets shorter, one stop in the morning instead of five, and after a few days an order has settled that you no longer think about.
On Sundays it takes longer
During the week the coffee is quick. On Sunday it may take its time, and the bar is the place where you stand while the rest of the flat is still asleep. When guests come, everyone drifts over to it, the way people in any kitchen end up standing where something is happening. And when, in Germany, afternoon coffee and cake are an appointment of their own, the morning bar becomes the counter where the big cups get their turn.
In Italy you drink your espresso standing up and talk to the barista while you do; the coffee takes a minute, the conversation longer. In France it belongs to the zinc counter and the view of the street, in Spain it comes in the afternoon as a cortado, and in the Netherlands someone keeps topping you up until you get up. All these habits hang on a place. Give them one at home and you bring them home.
The things on the bar
The grinder you circled for a year before buying it stands here. Grandmother's pot, no longer quite watertight, stands up here because it would not be allowed anywhere else. The beans come from the roaster three streets away, whose name you tell guests like a tip. Hardly any spot in a home gathers so much that is personal on so little space, and none is touched so often.
At seven o'clock the bar looks the way it looks: crumbs from grinding, yesterday's cup. Tomorrow morning it will be back where it belongs.
