Usciamo a fare colazione! ...Um, dove?

Last night I had a serious pang of nostalgia. I was in my pyjamas and flicking through a book of mine called The Usborne First Thousand Words In French. It's intended for children as it has lots of busy, colourful pictures of various locations and situations (such as at the supermarket and in the garden) with vocabulary around the borders to help you learn. I flick through it once in a while, hoping that something will stick which will prove vital in my translation exam, but I invariably end up looking for the little yellow duck that is hidden on every page.

At one point I came to a page with the layout of the town (the duck is on the bottom right, next to the little boy's leg) where there is a café with tables on a terrace area in front of it and someone is sat sipping a coffee. Thus I began dreaming of cafés abroad...

In Italy, breakfast at the local café (or bar as they’re called, because they sell alcohol too) are an integral part of the culture. People may not have breakfast al bar everyday - though some commuters do – but every once in a while you can expect to go out for a brioche (which is.. er.. a croissant) and a cappuccio. Some bars are better than others of course, and the one I tried at Milano Centrale station, with its poor offerings of stale pastries and coffee so bitter you’ll buy orange juice just to wash it down, far pales in comparison to ones that I’ve been to in small towns away from the tourists. If you choose the right bar you can find all manner of pastries, from plain ones to those filled with jam, custard, fruit, or even nutella. The coffee is the best you’ll find anywhere as well, with a latte macchiato being my favourite choice every time.

French bars/cafés are a slightly different experience. For one thing I have many happy memories of sitting outside bars in Grenoble in the morning sunshine, whereas in Italy you are more likely to have your coffee al banco or sat at a table indoors (at least in Northern Italy.) You also find that each French bar has its own character, with none of that uniformity malarkey you get in the Starbucks and Costa establishments that have invaded the UK (‘saving the world from mediocre coffee’ my foot.) The first bar I went to for breakfast on my first day in Grenoble was the Boite à Sardines with my flatmate Clém. As you might imagine from the name, the place was fairly small. It used be a market shop where dairy products were sold, and some of the old tin signs denoting the price of cheese and milk are still fixed to the walls, with various old farmingtools displayed on the shelves. It was rustic and friendly and I loved it. Shame about the coffee. A French café is essentially an espresso with extra water added to it, and the so-called café-au-lait does not exist. It’s actually called a café crème, costs around 3 euros and is not very nice.

My course mate Nadia and I decided one day in the spring term to go for breakfast once a week and try a different bar each time, taking it in turns to pick. We normally went to the same boulangerie first to buy a pastry or croissant (bars in France don’t tend to sell them but you’re allowed to bring them in to eat whilst you have your coffee) then we would set off in search of a new place to try. I miss this little ritual!

My favourite by far was called Jules Verne, which had a vast collection of travel mementoes reminiscent of Phileas Fogg. There were statues of leopards, Egyptian mummies, models of small planes, and each table had the name of a different famous author etched into it. The owner was friendly to us foreign students, which was infinitely appreciated in a country where our accents were constantly mocked. Sometimes I would go back by myself to study or write letters home.

Once we chose a café tucked away in a side street whose outside appearance was pretty inconspicuous. We ordered at the bar on the way in and sat down, nattering away and not paying much attention to our surroundings. When we finally looked around we realised to out horror that we had stepped into an extreme-leftist den. Every inch of the walls was adourned with images of Mao, newspaper clippings from May 1968, pictures of the hammer and sickle symbol… the few people in there were looking at us with brooding suspicion over the tops of their leftist newspapers and it was fairly intimidating. We finished our coffees quickly and vowed never to return. Who knows what kind of revolutionary conspiracies were hatched there!

Another cute one we found doubled as a bookshop, the tables placed in the nooks of a tiny bar area with barely the room to open a volume of Sartre. As a café it had a character and was very friendly. The staff, however, were not.

And so now I find myself lamenting the UK’s lack of non-American café culture. The closest thing we get to breakfast out (much to my Italian friends’ dismay) is a fry up in a greasy spoon. Despite being a strong advocate of British culture, I do believe continental Europe wins on this one. Sigh.