They’re cheaper. They’re more fun. They’re closer to home. They have better coffee. More interesting people go there. Give me a good café over a restaurant every time.
THE JOY OF BEING REGULAR
You can go back to a café more often. The admission fee is so much cheaper, you can return once a week, or once a day. Therefore, you gain the rights of the regular. A bit of recognition when you turn up; a ‘where’ve you been?’ when you’ve been away, a ‘see you Monday’ when you leave on Friday.
It doesn’t require a birthday event or an anniversary, or weeks of waiting for a booking, or the need to leave credit card numbers to secure that booking. And you don’t need to turn up at 5.45pm for a two hour turn around before ‘we need the table back’. Nor do they do degustations.
Cafes have loyalty programs for people who drink coffee there on a regular basis. That’s nice. They want you back, and they reward your loyalty. What do restaurants do?
THERE ARE NO RULES
There are times you want the grandeur, the kerfuffle, the polished stemmed glassware, the back-vintage cellar, the commitment to quality produce and the oh-so-now gastronomic flourishes of a restaurant. But not as often as you need the drop-in, have-what–you-like joy of a café.
There’s no formality, no degustation. Cafes are flexible. They are spaces in which you can do what you like, you can write your own story. You go to a restaurant and it’s their story that you have to fit into, their rules you have to abide by. You behave how they want you to behave, eat how they want you to eat, spend what they want you to spend. Even if there aren’t any rules, there is a social pressure to fit in with the crowd or let the side down.
If you want just have a coffee, you can. If you want scrambled eggs and bacon at three in the afternoon having just woken up, you can. If you want to read the newspaper while you eat, you can. You can run a business meeting in a café. You can goof off. You can take your mum, your kid or your dog.
You don’t have to hang around for hours on end before you can leave. So often in a restaurant I feel like a kid busting to get out and about instead of just sitting there waiting for the bill, waiting for the receipt, waiting for everyone to go to the loo…just waiting. I’m busy, I don’t have hours in the day I can devote to lunch, I can’t afford restaurant prices, and I don’t always to get to eat lunch within the framework of time a normal restaurant allows. Thank god for cafes.
THE GOSSIP IS BETTER
There’s more of a sense of community in a café. The locals all get together and talk. You can solve neighbourhood issues and problems. You can gossip. You get to see your neighbour fall in love. Then he moves in. Then she gets pregnant. Then they turn up with the kid. It’s life lived out in the public eye, and you’re part of the deal.
You can swap recipes in a café. You can get help with your cryptic crossword in a café (thanks, Joe). You can lounge around and loll about, you don’t have to sit up straight and cross your ankles like in a restaurant.
THEY’RE JUST MORE INTERESTING
More interesting people go to cafes than restaurants. Men who look like deadbeat artists; women who don’t feel they have to put make-up on in order to walk out the door; people who just ARE, rather than trying to be someone else. Let the boring people go to restaurants. I like cafes where plumbers sit next to architects while chatting to an out-of-work ballet dancer about the state government’s policy on footpaths. A good café has a mix of people in suits, trackies, gym shorts, cashmere, and studded black leather. Too much of any one of them, and it gets to be too much like an office, a gym, the north shore, or Oxford Street.
Cafes are messy, and sometimes dirty. That’s fine. I never worry too much about the mess and the dirt you can see. It’s the stuff you can’t see, hidden behind a facade of false cleanliness, that kills you.
CAFES ARE MORE SUSTAINABLE
You feel like you are making less of an impact on the environment - less waste, less silly business, less show-off unnecessary stuff going on. There are no brigades of staff hanging around waiting for your every move, no great legions of glasses to wash, and increasingly, just a help-yourself jug or tap of local water ( as at Bunker in Liverpool Street, Darlinghurst) instead of expensive imported bottled water.
How do restaurants (or cafes) justify importing bottled mineral water? We are in Australia. We have our own water. If it’s part of your culture ( ie Italian) then you have special papal dispensation – but it’s still not ideal. In America and in UK, I’ve come across restaurants that have put in special filtering systems for tap water. They then offer it filtered and either still or carbonated; they put a token charge on it for their own costs; and everybody’s happy. We need that here, please.
And I like a café that just brings a glass of water without even thinking. At Belaroma Coffee Centre (75 Kenneth Road, Manly Vale), coffee comes on a stainless steel tray complete with doily, glass of water, and biscotto. It’s a small and inexpensive sign of hospitality.
CAFÉ FOOD IS FOOD YOU WANT TO EAT
Sandwiches, pies, burgers, lemon coconut cakes, chocolate éclairs, things on toast…. eating in a café is like being on holidays. The best ones have so little room for a kitchen that they really have to think long and hard about what they can do – then they try to do it better than anyone else. There’s a single frypan on a lone burner in the tiny kitchen at Toby’s Estate in Manning Street in Sydney’s Pott’s Point, but their scrambled eggs with chorizo or with smoked salmon are beautifully done. The kitchen is even smaller at Liaison in Ridgeway Lane in Melbourne, but the food has its own queues.
THE BAD SIDE
Yes, there are annoying things about cafes. I know of five:
People who sit on one coffee for three hours while updating their Facebook page. (We know you just like looking as if you have work to do).
People who talk on their mobile phones without leaving the café. (Likewise).
Same-old bought in cakes and pastries you see everywhere.
Coffee that comes in mugs. Eeeuuugh.
Uncleared and un-wiped down tables. Not good enough.
WE NEED CAFES
Inner-city living is squeezy at the best of times. We don’t all have backyards or balconies or a local park that you feel safe in. We need cafes as our meeting places, our ‘pubs’, our common rooms, our village squares.
But we don’t need bad cafes or even ordinary cafes. We need good, caring café-owners who do their own thing, make their café a bit different by virtue of their own personality and what they bring to the table. We need serious coffee cafes, some with a small bar license, or a bakery, or a brewery, or a florist. We need cafes with a little bit of heart and a little bit of soul, and we need to be discriminating ourselves in order to walk past those cafes that do things by rote, that do everything in cheerless, fast-food fashion, that serve battery eggs and that don’t wipe their tables.
theage.com.au
november 5 2010
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