The Bitter Truth About French Coffee

You can find a café on almost every corner here, but it’s nearly impossible to get a good cup of coffee in Paris.

The coffee menu in cafés is invariable and disappointing. You can get a café, which is not a drip coffee, but rather a disappointingly small, bitter, and oily shot of espresso. Ordering a café crème—the same shot of espresso diluted with hot whole milk—helps the caffeine go down easier, but is no good when you’re just not in the mood for a stomach full of dairy.

There are two other standard café menu options, which are only slightly better than the puny café: a café noisette (French for hazelnut) and a café allongé. The first is a standard espresso served with a little heavy cream on the side, which gives the coffee a hazelnut color and takes off the bitter edge without provoking too much intestinal distress. The café allongé is probably the closest thing to an American coffee that you can buy in a café, but it is a sad substitute—espresso diluted with hot water. The flavor of a café allongé is just as mouth-puckering as that of a normal café; it just lasts longer.

There are, of course, branches of Starbucks in Paris. Starbucks prides itself on eerily recreating the same experience in each store, regardless of geography, so the roster of beverages is familiar: lattes, caramel macchiatos, Frappuccinos. You can get your soy, your extra whipped cream, or your vanilla syrup, if that’s your thing. But, either because they’re consciously sticking-it-to-the-man by delivering mediocre beverages or because they just haven’t been well-trained, French green-aproned baristas don’t deliver the goods the way their American counterparts do. French Starbucks lattes are heavy on the milk, light on the espresso, and so tepid that they go cold in minutes. Add to this their expense—a venti caramel macchiato costs 5.40 Euros (or, given the current exchange rate, approximately $8.50)—and Starbucks isn’t the most appealing option.

The worst coffee is from vending machines. I probably saw only one or two coffee vending machines in my life before coming to Paris, but here they seem to lurk everywhere you might expect to find a regular soda or candy vending machine.

At Reid Hall, home base for Columbia students in Paris, the area around the coffee vending machines is clogged with students waiting anxiously in line at most hours of the day and night. They put forty centimes in the coin slot, push plus- and minus-sign buttons to adjust the sugar levels to their liking, and hit a button for the beverage of their choice—straight-up espresso for the lionhearted, foamy cocoa-infused cappuccino, any of three kinds of hot chocolate (all indistinguishable from one another in the cup), lemon-scented tea, even vegetable soup for those feeling peckish. The machine begins to whir and click satisfyingly, deposits a three-inch-tall yellow plastic cup onto a dock, and starts to fill it with mysteriously steaming liquid. Finally, the machine beeps, the electronic sign flashes “récupérez,” and the student takes his or her first sip.

You’d be right not to think that a robotically mixed concoction of warm water, powdered milk, instant coffee, and sugar could be delicious—vending machine drinks are unfailingly disgusting. It’s not uncommon to find little clumps of undissolved cocoa powder floating at the top of your insipid cappuccino. The drinks will warm you up on a cold day, perhaps give you the energy to survive the second half of a mind-numbing lecture, and help you rid of pesky five-centime pieces, which are hard to spend anywhere else. But the act of consuming one is pure gustatory masochism.

On one hand, it’s surprising that the French seem to have no problem with bad coffee. On the other hand, the ubiquity of awful coffee here speaks to the way in which, to the French, eating and drinking are about so much more than eating and drinking.

Parisians come to cafés to sit and think and watch the world go by, not to experience a mind-blowingly well-brewed cup of joe. And a few minutes spent around the coffee machine provide a chance to catch up with friends, or maybe to run into someone you haven’t seen in a while.

Having a cup of coffee in Paris is not even remotely about the coffee itself. It’s about the ritual.

The good news is that the Gauls don’t have a monopoly over that ritual. The next time I have a bottomless cup of drip coffee at the Hungarian Pastry Shop in New York, the custom will be the same. It’s nice to know that the coffee, however, will be much better.

Laura Anderson is a Columbia College junior majoring in French and romance philology.
A Vegetarian in Paris runs alternate Wednesdays.