France: French coffee isn't bad. It's just tiny. And not really portable. At every Brasserie (cafe slash bar slash restaurant) in both Paris and rural towns, one can exchange about three dollars for a one-ounce cup of freshly brewed espresso. The quality varies from tasty to bitter. If you're a latte kind of gal or guy, you can get a cafe au lait, which will cost between three and five dollars and will be served in a 2-4 ounce cup, depending on whether you ask for a "petit" or "grand." It's satisfying, for about three minutes. Then, with the cup drained, you're left to entertain yourself until you can find the waiter again and ask for the bill. Fortunately, French cafe culture doesn't frown on loiterers.
Israel: The Holy Land brings coffee trouble of a different sort. The bean quality is usually good, and sizes are little bigger than in frog country--a whopping ten ounces or so at largest. Like France, no one cares how long you stay. There are coffee chains everywhere. They serve espresso beverages and (less frequently) filter coffee. The problem with drinks in Israel is that they are never, ever hot. Coffee is generally served on the hotter side of warm, so that the first sip of a latte here is the temperature of the last sip of a latte in the States. Within a couple minutes, the small drink that you just paid over three dollars for is tepid. Oh, but this place is plagued by an even more gruesome demon: Nescafe. Apparently this youthful country didn't develop a real cafe culture until recently. Before Cafe Hillel and Aroma dotted the Jerusalem streets like off-duty soldiers--i.e., they're everywhere--Nescafe was ubiquitous. (I don't just mean any old instant coffee; it's literally Nescafe.) Now, the same shops and restaurants that serve espresso also have Nescafe on the menu. And to further the insult, it's usually more expensive than real coffee! What sort of deranged sap would choose to purchase a lukewarm, 10-oz mug of bitter, disgusting Nescafe when there were perfectly respectable caffeinated alternatives available for 25 cents less?!
Egypt: Your only option here, unless you want a Nescafe, is "Arabic"/"Turkish" coffee. It's like the Turkish coffee available in the US except that it isn't sweetened or spiced: it's strong, served in a tiny glass with the fine grounds still in it. Smart people skip the last two sips, or wind up with a mouthful of grit. It's not bad. At least it's hot and cheap. Cairo, however, as a huge, international city, is home to ten branches of a terrible, local-cafe-crushing, American coffee chain. Yes. For our first excursion our first day in Egypt, Kyle and I went to Starbucks. More photographic evidence is available in the slideshow at right. I'd like to call Kyle the fink, since it was she that insisted we go, but I can't deny that I enjoyed every burning hot sip of that enormous, slightly over-roasted latte. Or that we went back three times.
1 comment:
american coffee likes you, too, and it misses you.
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