I was a daydream-prone child. My mental excursions often tended towards the romantic and macabre: on the countless journeys to and from school, whether on foot or by bus, I would grant my stifled young mind free reign to find in the mundane suburban-scape, which my parents had cruelly forced upon me, visual passages to more preferable—and/or intriguing—, imagined realms. An oft passed tree, for example, would for an instant become a distant view into a Baroque Dutch landscape. Or, the brown and orange interior of my neighborhood library—the afternoon rains beating the building into a martial cry—would become a lonely, alien theater inhabited by self-conscious actors and blank-page-filled prop books. As artists and writers (neither of which I purport to be!) know, such fantasies are difficult to sustain, the script too written to rewrite, the visual cortex too hardwired to rewire. Yet, these hopeless dreamers continue to seek out precisely what is out of their grasp: those moments when the physical world actually exceeds the restless desires of the untransformed self. These moments lie beyond some neuropsychological ‘twilight zone’, beyond the journal’d storyboard you sketched as an angry adolescent, and most certainly beyond the oneiric tale you once narrated to a bored lover whilst you both languished in a dirty, unmade bed. They’re different because they’re really fucking real.

I’ve left the suburbs; I’ve journeyed to the once-great cities of crumbled empires and the still-great capitals of economic imperialism. I’ve even hitched a ride with a meth-crazy truck driver and fallen off a mountain and broken a bone. Still searching, I then one day stumble into a concrete phantasm, climb two flights, and discover ‘Indian Coffee House’. Indian fucking coffee house. Yes.

The frothy milk coffee shite pictured above was not sampled by this tableauist. While I am hopeful I will be able to give Indian Coffee House the full attention it deserves—that is, by trying its milk-less, plain coffee brew—I must confess part of me is also hopeful that the next visit I make I will be greeted instead by a storehouse filled with bags of shredded papers. When I enquire about the fate of Indian Coffee House, a man sipping ‘Thums Up’ cola will meet my question with a quizzical expression and say, “Je n’ai pas d’idée que vous avez dite.”

I had hoped to introduce thos. more to Monmouth Coffee Company during a London business sojourn in December 2006, but my plans were thwarted by the fact that this café keeps rather inconvenient business hours. I suppose opening at 8 am is a reasonable business strategy; closing at 6:30 pm, on the other hand, is a lamentable decision. This means that the calendrical system, if you will, of Monmouth Coffee Company is firmly anchored to the workaday schedule of your average London suit. Presumably, once the shops and offices have closed, everyone heads to the pub. But for those of us who are more café-prone in the evenings, we are left with few options in Central London other than the Costas and the Starbucks. And for those of you who intended to skip church to go hang out at Monmouth Coffee Company, I’m afraid you’re also out of luck: the cafe is closed on Sundays.

There is also the matter of the holiday season. London, for those of you unaware of this peculiar fact, essentially closes down for the week between Christmas and New Year’s. Business hours, such as at Monmouth Coffee Company, are reduced, for everyone leaves the city to vacation in family cottages, where they drink hot toddies by firelight in the evenings and pick fastidiously at Wedgwood platefuls of biscuits and bite-size sandwich wedges during the day. Certainly I jest at this suggestion of such jolly good fun; the point, in essence, is that this festive time is a period of leisure. As no one is working, there is no need to keep a coffee shop open.

Too bad for us rapscallion tourists who, knowing no better, actually fly into London on 25 December, a day when the entire public transportation system for the city shuts down, and as a result end up having to tote eighty pounds (lbs) of books, travel presses, and typewriters from Victoria Station to Clapham Junction—on foot. If you should decide to rough it in London during this holiday week, expect that most of your favorite—or soon-to-be-favorite—coffee shops will be closed and the weather will be dismal for the duration. The one bright spot on the horizon is the vegan all-you-can-eat Thai buffet chain, which, amazingly, seems to have spread to every nook of the city. Though café-less and cold, you can at least look forward to never-ending heaps of soy strips and soy chunks, as well as a constant stream of customers who are alternately entertaining and annoying, but who will nevertheless provide you with a few nuggets of inspiration so that you and your business colleague, once you have exhausted all other topics, can discuss whether the Jack Sprat and Wife seated at the nearby table are indeed a married couple, or, whether, as brother and sister, they represent some carnivalesque expression of genetic potential gone awry.

When you arrive at Monmouth Coffee Company to find it closed, you will be able to peer through its glass front into the narrow interior. From this vantage point, you will be able to take in the extent of the establishment. Doubling as both café and shop, the Monmouth Coffee Company is of such a diminutive size that one feels discouraged from lingering for too long. Indeed, patrons are encouraged to share one of several large, heavily shellacked wooden booths with other coffee-sipping strangers. So, while you may have hoped to nestle yourself and a book into a cozy corner, you may just as well end up swapping café tableaux with a cute, saucy Londoner. (Caveat: you could also find yourself having to ‘make friends’ with two mothers with prams in tow!)

Above all else, I appreciate the proprietors’ concern for maintaining reasonable decibel levels in the café. Signs posted in the booths state that ‘this is a mobile free zone,’ in this case referring, in British, to what an American might call a ‘cell phone’, rather than to Alexander Calder’s primary-colored sculptural works, which is almost certainly what just sprang to your mind. (Calder, incidentally, was an American, which makes sense, for if he were British he most certainly would not have christened his hanging clusters with a name shared by the pocket-sized crutches too many of us tote around these days.) Monmouth Coffee Company also serves a nice filter coffee—a pleasant way to watch your brew take form, before your eyes, as well as to reduce the assault of swishes and grinds generated by constantly pawed machines. It is not often that one gets to feast upon such a lazy and indulgent sight in a cafe: the operation of water being filtered through one’s own individual serving of beans and paper.

As if in a nod to this emphasis upon process, the physical arrangement of the small café is such that the barista’s ‘work station’ is open and exposed to the coffee-drinkers seated nearby. This is a small gesture, to be sure, but the effects are profound: the patron is provided a view onto the machinations of the business, while the customer’s social shield is rendered transparent to the eyes of the roving employee. They both—to put it another way—occupy the same living room. What I’m really trying to say is you will have eminently more opportunities to flirt with that hot phe who’s fixing coffee drinks—or, if you should choose, to chat with the Aussie twenty-something who ended up sitting at your table. If you are feeling extremely outgoing, strike up a conversation with the fifteen or so people who fill up the café/shop to its capacity and make plans to head off to the Indian vegan buffet in Islington before this cozy little experiment kicks everyone out at 6:30.

* While Monmouth Coffee Company’s beans are not Fair Trade Certified, I have learned–through personal communication–that the proprietors seek to establish ’sustainable, fair, and equal trade’ relationships with the growers and exporters with whom they do business. We at Cafe Tableaux encourage any patron interested to learn more about Monmouth Coffee Company’s business practices and ethics to contact the proprietors themselves.

‘Angels in my Kitchen’ is your typical Delhi café. It boasts an extensive menu that neither inspires one to wonder at the skill of the chefs, nor to speculate upon the amount of preparation given to the multitude of dishes on tap. Rather, when confronted with such gastronomic tomes—a common feature of ‘Western’-style establishments in India—I am left to ponder at the quality that slips through the cracks when café-a-teurs insist upon being such dilettantes. Need any one eatery offer breakfast, lunch, dinner, dessert, and electrolyte sachets? Certainly, this is not a feature restricted exclusively to South Asian establishments—see thos. more’s kaffa crossing tableau, for an example of a similarly confused ‘café’ in our own West Philadelphia, PA—but being a resident currently in Delhi, I am forced to face this particular situation squarely, in the face, on a daily basis. I can only imagine that ‘Angels in my Kitchen’ would improve infinitely if it were to transform itself into a nice little coffee house. I say this not out of some misguided self-interest (ok, yes, it would lend legitimacy to this at-the-moment questionable ‘café’ tableau), but rather because I believe Delhi’s brand-conscious, rising middle class could really use a kick in the pants, and I am positive a home-grown, independent, fair-trade-conscious coffee house is just the venue for the job.

I also propose that ‘Angels in my Kitchen’ nix the Journey and the Billy Joel, both of which were heard during this morning’s visit to said establishment. I can appreciate some mid-thirties lawyer from Minneapolis digging on such bad 80’s tunes, but the notion that this music carries an audience here only conjures notions of some bizarrely misplaced, schizophrenic nostalgia for the conspicuous consumption of the Reagan years. In India, mind you.

There are some things we are unable to transcend, but by recognizing our own agency—the potency of subjective experience—we may be able to locate some breach in the strictures of habitus that bind and structure us. I would like to think I succeeded in doing just that, whilst sipping an adequately pulled cup of espresso today at ‘Angels in my Kitchen’. I had allowed my mind to wander, to meditate upon the view onto the multi-storey Pizza Hut across the way, when I spotted a cat plying his way from rooftop to rooftop. As this is in fact the first cat I have seen in Delhi—and I have been here for two months—I am positive this sign augurs well for our little market. Perhaps next year, when I return to Delhi, I will find that things have changed for the better. In ‘Angels’ place, I will find a new establishment—a coffeehouse, perhaps, called ‘Cats in my Kitchen’. Or, better yet, ‘Angels’ will have become entirely overrun by cats, its large market-facing windows filled with lounging calicos, harlequins, and tabbies.

Second, the first coffeehouse in Istanbul opened in 1554. That’s more than four hundred years before the first grungy, bagel-serving, hipster café was established in the United States! I understand there is some current debate over the possibility of the existence of a coffeehouse at the fledgling English settlement of Jamestown. It seems John Smith hoped to improve conditions—as well as boost the morale—of the disease-ridden community by serving chicory-and-coffee-berry brews and vegan scones to malnourished members of the colony. According to one source, Smith and Pocahontas decorated the coffee shop with various found objects: synthetic furs, grass figurines, and an eclectic assortment of pressed-flower/bark compositions. Discounts were offered to those who brought their own clay pots, and there was allegedly much experimentation with alternative ‘milk’ options, using such unorthodox ingredients as tobacco, mulch, and snow. Of course, until archaeological evidence proves unequivocally that this lore is indeed historical fact, the story of Jamestown’s ‘Indie Coffee Cafe’ will have to be accepted as mere conjecture. In any case, assuming its existence is indeed proved, it will still postdate Istanbul’s first café by more than sixty years. Consider this: would you rather drink espresso in a mosquito-infested swamp, or sip kahve—yes, amidst a slew of pastries—on the literal foundations of café culture?

Third, there is an abundance of red stumpy-tailed manx tabbies that can be found on the grounds of the Hagia Sophia and in the vicinity, hanging out on door stoops near Çiğdem Pastanesi, for example.

Finally, the coffee at Çiğdem Pastanesi is quite good. Contrary to popular belief, Turks generally don’t drink ‘Turkish coffee’. Rather, you are more likely to be offered tea or Nescafe in most eating establishments. It is for this reason that the French press option at Çiğdem Pastanesi is such a treat. Enjoy your fresh coffee whilst examining the café’s curious interior. The condition of its bricked-up windows, wood paneling, and hand-glazed tile floor suggests a date of circa 1590. Clearly Çiğdem Pastanesi has seen much change—no doubt its ownership has passed through many hands, from pashas and Venetian merchants to sheikhs and possibly Atatürk himself—and its antiquated décor reflects this. Fine, there is no wireless internet access available, and the number of sweet and savory foods on the menu outnumbers the items on the beverage list. But this is where history happens, where the wheels of civilization grind away. On cold winter eves, the bards string together tales of distant places; they sing of dairy-free doughnuts and French Peruvian roasts. They know what’s out there, but this is Istanbul: why should they do things differently?

Incidentally, for those of you curious about the prevalence of the ‘croissant’ in the old Ottoman capital, this pastry, whose (apocryphal?) history relates that its origins were born from anti-Turk sentiment in Viennese culinary circles (thus its ‘crescent’ shape) during the 1680s, does not appear to be popular in Istanbuli cafes. If you have a hankering for one, however, there is a small restaurant at the international airport in Istanbul, where you can enjoy—in all its irony—a fresh croissant stuffed with traditional Turkish food bits.

I was very pleased when I learned that a new coffee shop was being installed right near my residence. Looking back, I’m not sure how I allowed my expectations to be raised so. Located on the left bank of the Schuylkill, along a major east-west artery leading into University City, Walnut Bridge Coffee House is strategically sited to function like a trawl, scooping up Penn and Drexel students walking to and from campus, as well as service the anonymous loft-dwellers who live in the box across the street. Nevertheless, in the earliest stages of my brief relationship with Walnut Bridge Coffee House, I was still in the naive throes of relishing the pairing of ‘bridge’ and ‘coffee,’ and, overall, was looking forward to sampling this neighborhood cafe’s goods.

It’s nice that the cafe is on a bridge. On the other hand, seeing that there is no bike rack in front of the cafe, one is left with few options for locking, other than to shackle one’s wheels to a nearby, trash-strewn staircase, or to give up on Philadelphia entirely, toss said bike over the bridge, buy a car, and move to New Jersey. I chose the former option, and proceeded towards the coffee shop — again — this time on foot. Upon this second approach, Walnut Bridge Coffee House’s preference for the pedestrian customer became abundantly clear, for there exists no other signage for the cafe than a near-invisible crimson logo sticker’d onto the establishment’s glass face. All evidence of the cafe’s presence is invisible, unless viewed from the sidewalk while on foot. Such design choices cannot be accidental, I assume — but maybe I give the proprietor(s) too much credit.

After finally gaining entrance to the cafe, I walk purposefully to the counter. “Just a coffee to go, please.” I pay and wait expectantly. The barista motions towards the wall behind me. Turning, I find several coffee thermoses arranged in a line — apparently I am supposed to pump my own coffee. This is an arrangement that, to me, seems to debase what is most sacred about the cafe transaction. Why don’t they just have a coin-operated contraption that dispenses cups, and then dispense with the barista entirely? This is no ‘house.’ I’d rather lug my bike up a storey to my own apartment, brew a pressful of cafe, and serve myself in a more comfortable setting of detached solitude.

If you exit out the rear of the café, you’ll find yourself before an odd little domicile. Beyond is a parking lot, a movie-set-like alley, and then some street that loops around, back to Main. That’s Northampton: a nice little loop spotted by places such as the Haymarket, where one can stop for a steamed slatte, in between snacking on tofu on the lawn near the town hall and browsing for used books. I enjoyed it while it lasted—before I had to drag myself back onto the interstate so I could speed for no reason, scan impatiently for public radio, and count ribbon magnets.

Located in the basement of Penn’s library, Mark’s Cafe beckons like a seductive footnote. For years I have sought such a marriage—cafe and library—the way the mythologized, Arthurian knight sought the metaphorical Grail. I have long meditated upon the harmony of these fantasied scenes: sipping a dark, earthy brew while scrolling through a reel of microfilm; or, pausing after the fifteenth photocopied page, in order to request a refill from the carefully coiffed, demure barista, whose nose, as well, is too often buried in a book.

I know you are not surprised to learn my search for such a utopia remains unfulfilled. Mark’s Cafe is more like a hospital cafeteria than it is akin to the Kaffeehausen of Vienna (its roasted berries carrying wafts of olfactory tropes: mustachioed literati, turbaned scholars, haggling merchants). Keep yourself planted on the fifth floor instead, or—better yet—avoid the library altogether and head to Kaffa or Green Line, where, yes, the books are fewer in number, and, yes, you will hear that one Magnetic Fields song play for the nth time. But—please believe me, reader—the quiet hum of the library’s services and the cold, incandescent lighting better suits a bibliophile’s Piranesian, intertextual pursuits, than it does a coffee and smilk break.

*Penn ID or Driver’s License required to gain entrance into library. Wifi web access available to students only.

Camera Café indeed lives up to its name, offering for purchase various kinds of hot drinks, as well as filters, lenses, and—yes—cameras. I don’t want to spill forth right at the start all the reasons Camera Café is amazing (café + camera = guaranteed good thing), waxing hyperbolic towards a soaring crescendo, to leave the reader at the end with only a trite denouement. So, I will begin this ’scene’ with a litany of criticisms, which may or may not touch upon some common café complaints, such as regarding baristas who spitefully inform customers of extra charge for soymilk; the subjection of patrons to hours of commercial-accompanied classic rock; drug busts staged frequently at intersections adjacent to cafes; streams of perambulators persistently filling café spaces; café interiors that are too dark; and so on. But I can’t do that. Because Camera Café is (near) perfect.

As I am faced with a dearth of decent cafes in my current abode, I have come to obsess over the preponderance (and cost) of soymilk in coffee establishments, resorting to carrying my own soymilk. Does Camera Café charge for soymilk? Do they even carry soymilk? I don’t care. There are cameras and coffee here—and photographs of bikes on the walls, glass cases filled with matchbox cars, a small skylight that filters the grey London sun into a tiny seating nook, and a circa-1980 Scrabble set that is wedged into a crowded bookcase. Frank Sinatra croons through the speakers:

Walk on through the wind,
walk on through the rain,
Though your dreams be tossed and blown,
Walk on, walk on with hope in your heart,
And you’ll never walk alone,
you’ll never walk alone.

Yet this is a place to be alone, mulling over waxy, holographic memoryscapes, pressing fingers into skin, to imagine for one moment what it’s like to be touched—a simulation that never really ‘works’; and on top of that, to savor the bitter taste of solitude, the impossibility of communion of any kind. If you’re a connoisseur of such moments, scouring alleys and beacons for things broken, wasted, and shattered, which you will stockpile and later forget…if no other offers an ear with which to share these vignettes, then Camera Cafe will suit you.

Or, like the suit seated nearby, you can conduct a three-way conference call using Camera Café’s free (!) wireless network. “Listen, Seneca: I’m playing a very devious game here! We will buy 50% of the shares if the people react poorly to the foreign minister’s death.”

Soymilk, free of charge. Come on down.

Approaching Mugshots by bike from Center City, one is obliged to trek up ‘Fairmount Hill,’ as my colleague has recently dubbed that mound of residential rock which is capped by the Eastern State Penitentiary. I cycled up there one day late last spring–greeted by the prison’s looming turrets and crenellated crest, my mind began to wander to thoughts of battlements, the neo-post-neo Gothic as a Platonic ideal, and . . . bacon. Yes: This overwhelming waft of swine, as I was soon to learn, was emanating from none other than Mugshots. In this quaint Philadelphia prison neighborhood, it is apparently customary on Sunday morns to ‘perfume’ the streets with the scent of bubbling lard. How nice, I might have thought, if I were inclined toward lard, schmaltz, and the like. As it were, I am not. And yet I persevered–giving the prison one last squinty-eyed glance, I proceeded to boost my sickened viscera with a dose of prophylactic adrenaline, and then dragged my sorry form into Mugshots, fixed to receive my punishment.

Upon entering the cafe, other concerns rapidly overtook bacon anxieties, for, as the old adage goes, ‘where pork doeth fry, greasy hands do lie’ (in this case, many small hands bearing sesame seeds and uncapped markers). Faced with a barrage of yelping mini-people wrapped, snapped, and strung with mini-things, I thought to myself, Why do the multitudes of parents who tote their young charges (aged 0 – ?) to coffee shops like Mugs expect other patrons to obligingly ‘enjoy’ the screams and antics of said parents’ little monkeys? When I go to a cafe, I don’t inflict screeches, loudly-belted songs, and/or the pawing of grimy hands upon others; why should I have to put up with the same from some tot, just because tot’s mom thought it would be nice to meet up with Susie and Joan, post-workout, for a decaf white chocolate raspberry double cappuccino (hold the espresso)? Whereas at one time one could relish a quiet Sunday morning mug at the corner cafe, the once-peaceful coffee joint appears to have fallen victim today to the demands of our children-centered culture.

It seems the kids are destined to be the ultimate victors: It is nearly impossible to get a decent cafe past 10pm in this city, presumably because coffee shop proprietors figure their primary target customers (i.e. kiddies) are in bed by then. Nevertheless, I still dream that some day the penitentiary will re-open, to operate as a rehabilitative center providing solitude and discipline for the unwieldy youths. Should this occur, you will find me sitting solo at a café table across the street, sipping a black coffee while savoring a comfortable silence.

addendum:
Mugshots Coffeehouse is a member of Philadelphia’s Independents Coffee Cooperative.