There is an atmosphere that belongs to coffeeshops alone, something cozy and alluring that invites people to sit and stay for a spell. While coffeeshops have become a part of many of our daily routines, it’s the small, independent coffeehouses that maintain the ideal of what a coffeeshop is—what they can be. They’re charming, often a bit eclectic and infused with heart and the understanding of what coffeeshops represent in a community—a place of community. There’s a warmth there, the promise of good coffee and better conversation.
Coffeehouses have lured in every type of person since their inception, but perhaps no one group identifies with and adores the romance of a coffeeshop quite like writers, readers, and artists.
The Drink
Today’s drink is inspired by the café culture of centuries past, when coffee was the exciting new alternative to beer and the resulting coffeehouses that popped up all over European cities became the go-to place for free thinkers and artistic types seeking intellectual conversation and cultural stimulation. In honor of those early coffee-loving, café-frequenting writers, we’re drinking espresso martinis.
Café Culture Among Artists
Café culture has its origins in the Middle East, one of the first places coffee was grown. It was here that the world’s first coffeehouses opened around the late 15th century or early 16th century, quickly becoming popular meeting places and fostering discussions—as they would go on to do around the world—that inspired connection and community. In fact, these coffeehouses were so popular that, in a move that would be replicated during other ages by other world leaders, they were outlawed by the Ottoman Empire from 1512 to 1524 due to the dangerous nature of such open political discussion that was held there. Coffee itself was even outlawed, with Sultan Murad IV declaring death to all coffee drinkers. However, the ban didn’t last and soon the popularity of coffee spread throughout the world, reaching Europe in the early-to-mid 17th century. Coffeehouses soon followed, the first in Europe believed to have been established in 1632 or 1640 in Venice. More quickly followed in Paris, England, and America.
Related: Five Parisian Cafés for Book Lovers
Europeans loved coffeehouses for the coffee, which rose in popularity quickly for its health benefits and the energy boost it provided without the ill-effects of excessive ale and wine drinking that was consumed in favor of the dirty, undrinkable water. However, it wasn’t long before the atmosphere and opportunity coffeehouses provided became the draw for patrons frequenting them. In England, pubs were places of rowdy working-class types and more formal clubs were places of exclusivity where business and politics were the more appropriate topics of conversation between gentlemen. Coffeehouses, however, offered an alternative that went against London’s strict social hierarchy and provided a space where any man could walk in and sit next to someone else as equals. Conversation and ideas could flow a little more freely than at formal clubs, though still intelligently since drunkenness was not a concern for patrons. Sober conversation about a wide range of topics from the usual politics and business to science, religion, literature, poetry, and more abounded. In Oxford, where the first coffeehouse in England was opened in 1652, coffeehouses earned the nickname “penny universities” because, for the price of a coffee, anyone could take part in or listen to lively, sober debate and conversation about relevant topics. The same was true around Europe, from Paris to Vienna and Prague, as coffeehouses, and the resulting café culture, flourished over the centuries.
“In their golden age between 1680-1730, [coffeehouses] were centers of criticism—literary at first, then also political, in which became to emerge, between aristocratic society and bourgeois intellectual, a certain parity of the educated.”
—Jürgen Habermas, 20th century German philosopher and sociologist
Coffeehouses around the world developed their own unique clientele over the ages. Some served mostly businessmen while others attracted more criminally-inclined men looking for local haunts from which to conduct their less-than-honorable business. Conversations that changed history took place in coffeehouses, including those between the revolutionaries who planned the Storming of the Bastille. And, of course, there were those coffeehouses that served largely free-thinking, artistic types. It was perhaps these people and these coffeehouses that had the most impact on our modern impression of café culture in the past and how it developed into what it is today, still such a part of the atmosphere and aesthetic that both attracts and defines readers, writers, and artists. The popularity of patronizing coffeehouses for specific types of discussions shifted throughout history as new social fashions swept in and as the exclusivity of coffeehouses fluctuated. When the Parisian upperclass elites moved from coffeehouses to holding fashionable salons in their private homes where discussions of the arts came as a second thought after the more important topics of business and politics, the coffeehouses of Paris became central gathering places for literary and artistic people, among other bohemian types. While English coffeehouses banned alcohol in an effort to further distance themselves from pubs, cafés across the Continent served spirits and expensive wines. They cultivated a sense of elegance with decor that included marble, expensive furniture, and mirrors—something the artists were sure to appreciate.
Related: Shakespeare and Company | The Most Famous Bookstore in Paris
The effect of coffeehouses on literature is immeasurable, unknowable. From their inception, coffeehouses were a place for the cross pollination of ideas that eventually impacted art and literature. Even our modern impression of European coffeehouses of the past is directly formed, at least in part, in response to the depiction of coffeehouses and café culture within paintings and novels by those frequenting them. Impressionist artists like Gauguin, Renoir, Van Gogh, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec often painted scenes inspired by the café culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s known that Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sarte plotted books in Parisian cafés. Le Procope, which opened in Paris in 1686, boasts a rich history of noteworthy patrons including Voltaire, Victor Hugo, Thomas Jefferson, and more. Voltaire, who is said to have drunk between 30 and 40 cups of coffee mixed with chocolate a day, is honored at the café with his desk on display there. It’s also the considered the unofficial birthplace of the Encylopedié, the first modern encyclopedia and the achievement of members of the Enlightenment movement who used to gather there. Café de Flore, also in Paris, acted as the headquarters for the Lost Generation, the expat American writers who moved to Paris in the early 20th century, including Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot. In Petersburg, Literaturnoe Kafe was frequented by Chernyshevsky and Dostoyevsky while Café Monmarte in Prague hosted Franz Kafka and Israeli writer Max Brod. The oldest coffeehouse in Rome, Antico Caffe Greco established in 1760, attracted the likes of Lord Byron, Hans Christian Andersen, Percy Shelly, John Keats, Mark Twain, and other writers from around the world.
Coffeehouses have been beacons of warmth and community for everyone for centuries, but especially writers. Today, literary types find pieces of themselves within coffeeshops all over the world—something in the warmth, the eclectic charm, the overwhelming sense of being somewhere where likeminded people are also spending their time. It’s a place writers can write or read or simply gather inspiration through the simple, quiet joy of people watching over a cup of coffee. Coffeeshops fuel us and inspire us. You never know just who might be writing the next bestseller right next to you. Over a cup of coffee, of course.
“Were it not for coffee one could not write, which is to say one could not live.”
“As soon as coffee is in our stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.”
-Honoré de Balzac, French writer who supposedly drank 50 cups of coffee a day
The Recipe
Espresso martinis are incredibly simple recipes. Just a few easy-to-find ingredients and you’ll be sipping as if you were at a Parisian café as the afternoon melts slowly into night, lost in a book.
There are many variations of espresso martinis, but they usually come down to the same few ingredients. This specific recipe originally appeared on Absolut Drinks and makes one martini.
1 1/3 ounces of vodka
2/3 ounce of Kahlua (or your choice of coffee liqueur)
2/3 ounce of espresso
3 coffee beans
Directions
Brew espresso and let cool completely
Add vodka, Kahlua, and espresso to a shaker filled with ice
Shake it up enough to create foam
Pour into a martini glass
Top with three espresso beans and enjoy!
Pairs Well With
In choosing books that pair well with espresso martinis, celebrate literary life, and bring to mind the rich history of café culture within the literary world, a few books immediately came to mind. From fun contemporary romance and historical fiction to revealing biographies of women who changed literature (over martinis, I might add) and an exploration of coffeehouses’ impact on culture and society throughout history, these books have you covered.
Book Lovers
by Emily Henry
Nora Stephens’ life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.
Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small-town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute.
If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.
The Paris Bookseller
by Kerri Maher
When bookish young American Sylvia Beach opens Shakespeare and Company on a quiet street in Paris in 1919, she has no idea that she and her new bookstore will change the course of literature itself.
Shakespeare and Company is more than a bookstore and lending library: Many of the prominent writers of the Lost Generation, like Ernest Hemingway, consider it a second home. It’s where some of the most important literary friendships of the twentieth century are forged–none more so than the one between Irish writer James Joyce and Sylvia herself. When Joyce’s controversial novel Ulysses is banned, Beach takes a massive risk and publishes it under the auspices of Shakespeare and Company.
But the success and notoriety of publishing the most infamous and influential book of the century comes with steep costs. The future of her beloved store itself is threatened when Ulysses’ success brings other publishers to woo Joyce away. Her most cherished relationships are put to the test as Paris is plunged deeper into the Depression and many expatriate friends return to America. As she faces painful personal and financial crises, Sylvia–a woman who has made it her mission to honor the life-changing impact of books–must decide what Shakespeare and Company truly means to her.
The Social Life of Coffee: The Emergence of the British Coffee House
by Brian Cowan
What induced the British to adopt foreign coffee-drinking customs in the seventeenth century? Why did an entirely new social institution, the coffeehouse, emerge as the primary place for consumption of this new drink? In this lively book, Brian Cowan locates the answers to these questions in the particularly British combination of curiosity, commerce, and civil society. Cowan provides the definitive account of the origins of coffee drinking and coffeehouse society, and in so doing he reshapes our understanding of the commercial and consumer revolutions in Britain during the long Stuart century.
Britain’s virtuosi, gentlemanly patrons of the arts and sciences, were profoundly interested in things strange and exotic. Cowan explores how such virtuosi spurred initial consumer interest in coffee and invented the social template for the first coffeehouses. As the coffeehouse evolved, rising to take a central role in British commercial and civil society, the virtuosi were also transformed by their own invention.
Three Martini Afternoons at the Ritz
by Gail Crowther
Introduced at a workshop in Boston University led by the acclaimed and famous poet Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton formed a friendship that would soon evolve into a fierce rivalry, colored by jealousy and respect in equal terms.
In the years that followed, these two women would not only become iconic figures in literature, but also lead curiously parallel lives haunted by mental illness, suicide attempts, self-doubt, and difficult personal relationships. With weekly martini meetings at the Ritz to discuss everything from sex to suicide, theirs was a relationship as complex and subversive as their poetry.
Based on in-depth research and unprecedented archival access, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz is a remarkable and unforgettable look at two legendary poets and how their work has turned them into lasting and beloved cultural figures.
Final Thoughts
We all know how well a steaming cup of coffee pairs with a good book or even an inspired writing session, but an espresso martini may be the perfect thing to sip on for a little bit of a twist on the perfect reading experience. They’re simply exquisite—a rich, full coffee flavor made nuanced and sharp with the Kahlua and vodka. I love that the intensity of this drink comes not just from the alcohol alone, but from the espresso. My martinis had trouble foaming despite my most rigorous efforts with the shaker, but they were a crowd pleaser nonetheless. Though they might not have been drinking espresso martinis in the coffeehouses of centuries past, these modern cocktails are the perfect drinks to toast to café culture with.