Notes from Underground Cafés

What is a coffee shop? What is a café? It's a problem that many have grappled with. In The Republic, Thrasymachus demands that a café is simply a place to have a coffee. Socrates replies, "But Thrasymachus, you are a sensible man, are you not? Why do you not have coffee in your home?" Thrasymachus says that indeed he does have coffee, but sometimes he prefers to go out for one instead. "So you go out simply for a coffee, as you would put it, instead of staying at home, where you already have coffee and a slave to make it for you. We all know that the coffee in the café is vastly more expensive. Is this a good way to spend your money, Thrasymachus?"

"It is worth the extra," says Thrasymachus.

"And what would you say makes the extra worth that is being added to the value of the simple coffee?" says Socrates.

"To be out of one's home, to be amongst the people of the city as they come and go and stop and read and talk, to smell the coffee brewing, and the baguettes, paninis and bagels."

"But, my dear man, did you not say that the café is a place to simply have a coffee, and nothing more?"

"Or a panini, or a bagel,"

"It sounds like there is yet more to it than that, am I wrong?"

"No, perhaps you are not wrong, Socrates," conceded Thrasymachus.

And Socrates went forth to try to further understand what it is that makes a coffee in a coffee establishment different from a coffee at home.

But let's leave the room where the Greeks do their chatter, and find out for ourselves, yes? In London's many coffee shops we will go, with notes aplenty to recount. What of the staff, the furniture, the music, the lighting, the pictures that line the walls, the quality if the coffee, the garden, the clientele? What makes this place what it is? And is it any good?

Note: despite the illusory sensation that Starbucks, Costa, Pret a Manger, Nero, etc., are indeed coffee shops, they will not be included here. There are various reasons. 1. Due to the corporate structure, the staff are the same as staff in supermarkets or Macdonalds, which makes the labour experience in one of these shops one of undifferentiated corporate submission, rendering the staff little more than smiling robots, and empties the coffee itself from its coffeeness, making it somewhat a burger or a loaf of bread. 2. 'Experience' is handed down as a necessary business strategy, a gimmick, thereby precluding reality in this particular space. I'm not talking about authenticity here, but formulas. 3. The formula means that the same thing will be found in Idaho, Brighton, and Moscow, and has a fundamentally detrimental effect on local idiosyncrasies, whilst simultaneously promoting an ideology of prescribed sameness. 4. The economic factors that go with that previous point, as well as the labour problems that come with having a global work force, including union rights and coffee farmers. 5. The 'save a coffee farmer's child by buying a coffee' rubbish that makes you think you're saving the world by shopping at Starbucks instead of making it worse. 6. The idea is to experience the diversity, not the uniformity, of London's cafes, and to do so before they have all become franchised replicas of one another.

To the coffee!