What's In A Name?

People still call them coffee shops. The places with formica tables, plastic, colored, leatherette seats, sandwiches, soups (you're in luck if  they're homemade), chilis, bouffant desserts-and coffee-endless cups from a waiter or waitress who might just call you hon.

 Oh and the food's cheap, without being ethnic (unless it's Greek but that's another story) .  The menu doesn't focus on trendy or newly discovered to be healthy ingredients (pigs cheek, truffle oil, wheatgrass, amaranth or gluten-free anything). And there's a lot of food. Sometimes the food is very, very good and sometimes it's not. Busy, noisy and usually badly decorated, coffee shops are unlikely ever to be fashionable.

In New York City, they were around before Starbucks around before one-off coffee places with curated beans and maybe even before (but here I'm not sure) the Italian cafes called “coffee houses” in the Village (Greenwich ) and Brooklyn (pre-hipster, pre-boho). These "coffee houses" still serve great Italian espresso in small cups with lemon zest wrapped around the rim imparting its oily, acid flavor to the drink and provide sweet pastry, great or not- depending on the place. I'm partial to the cannoli.

Other old time places to get coffee and a light meal have fallen by the wayside. The wonderful Horn and Hardart Automats, which were like self-service toy shops in which food appeared seemingly by magic in little glass windows, are gone. Likewise, Schraft's, a chain of lunchrooms where my grandmother would meet other ladies, clad like her in Chanel inspired suits and white gloves . They'd eat nondescript, refined and not very memorable food followed by yummy ice cream, those visits displaying eating as an assertion of taste and class, as it so often is.  Unless you count Starbucks for its shine and chrome, and I wouldn't, the Automats alas have not been replaced. Nor has Schraft's.

Th newer coffee places, frequently with brown or dark green sofas and original  paintings for sale on the walls, have their charms, not least among them comfort and wifi. They're great places to go when you want to write a blog, meet a friend or chat with the curly haired guy with soulful eyes at the next table. I prefer the homey, simple ones to the sweet looking, overpriced frou frou type my grandmother might have preferred (maybe I was wrong about Schraft's not being replaced). But none of them are coffee shops. They lack the bustle, familiarity, large-enough-to-drown-in menus and quickly moving patrons and wait staff.

Coffee shops are unique snapshots of the city, although they're a little harder to find than they used to be.  And they welcome everyone. Inside you'll find breakfast regulars, tourists, lunch pals from the office and people in a rush going God knows where,who can't wait another minute to eat something - sometimes at 10 o'clock at night. And emerging from the maws of an unseen kitchen come homemade bean and chicken soups, mammoth portions of meatloaf, mashed potatoes and string beans, endless varieties of eggs and the biggest piece of apple pie you've ever seen, all at breakneck speed and sometimes if you're lucky, delicious. In a nod to modern tastes and appetites you might even get a veggie burger if you ask for one, maybe even a chopped salad. Always open,usually rushed but with someone always ready to pour you another cup free - and offer you a mint at the cash register. Don't forget to leave a good tip.

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Home Sweet Home

I live in a place where people mostly live in houses, not apartments. Many have lived in the same neighborhood, not just town or city, for generations. Most people live with another or several others. I live alone. It's the kind of place where when I tell people I lived somewhere else, they ask if I “moved back.” I didn't. Minute differences are acutely observed here. A neighbor remarked upon the fact that I use my front door and not my back to enter and exit. Gardens, local sports teams and restaurants that closed two decades ago are subjects of lively discussion. Sometimes I feel a little lost, a little off kilter. I come from a city with millions of inhabitants, large apartment buildings and, a lively, loud, but friendly street life (New York City) and lived for nine years in a charming,beautiful much more formal one (Paris). You can be ignored in both and I miss a sense of discovery, anonymity and bigness.

In times of personal turmoil and chaos, when my daily assumptions were shattered, or even when I just needed to refresh myself, I would go for long walks in both and lose myself in new streets and unknown faces.

I remember back before SOHO in Manhattan was SOHO, my boyfriend and I used to go down  there occasionally to visit our friends Tony,an artist, and his wife Hatsie in their loft  apartment in a former warehouse. We'd play poker with a loose knit group of friends.  They were like homesteaders on the frontier surrounded by warehouses.  The warehouses were empty and untended looking against the night sky, seeming to lack any context. An Italian bakery was the only homey thing in sight.  Even then, I found the strange, unsettling skyscape somehow soothing and comforting, as if it spoke to something in my soul.

And when I lived in Paris, I'd sometimes get off at unknown metro stations in unfamiliar neighborhoods, sometimes in immigrant areas with North African accented French and see spice and garment stores where I knew the names and uses of nothing and loved being wrapped up briefly in another world.

And now, here I am in a place that lends itself more to discovery by car than on foot, and where so much is different from what I've been used to.  And so, I have adapted. At first, when I was in turmoil or in need of refreshment, I didn't know what to do. But I have found a solution. I have discovered a parallel to the soothing, walks I used to take on crowded streets of strangers.

Here, I take a ride. It needs to be far, past suburbs to small towns and hamlets onto 55 mile an hour two lane roads with simple, clapboard houses standing by the roadside. And then,  in isolated hamlets and onlittle used roads, I feel at peace. It's the same kind of peace I used to feel when I walked unexpected streets in New York or Paris and saw rundown warehouses or stores with foreign writing selling things I'd never seen before. And then I can come home and feel it it really might be home. And that feels good.