Around the Globe, Cafes Offer Up a Cup of Camaraderie and Repose

Nearly every place, from Venice’s Piazza San Marco to L.A.’s Venice Beach, has a cafe where tourists go to talk, rest, look at their maps and drink coffee. The elixir knows no borders, which partly explains the special relationship between the cafe and the traveler.

Coffee is a natural for travelers, energizing and uplifting after too many flights of steps and museums full of Old Masters. It can be warming or cooling, depending on whether it’s hot or iced. It makes some people loquacious, which encourages travelers and locals to socialize when they meet in cafes. Others turn ruminative under its influence, pondering the wonders of the wider world.

“Cafes are the best places in the world to be alone in company. Strangers can either people-watch or get involved in a conversation,” says Stewart Allen, author of “The Devil’s Cup: Coffee, the Driving Force in History” (Soho Press, 1999).

Coffee drinking and the rituals one can observe in coffeehouses reflect much about culture and lifestyle. Turks like it thick and sugary. Italians drink espresso standing up. The English used to live in coffeehouses, until they discovered tea. Americans come from the land of the bottomless cup.

Thus a good cafe serves more than good coffee, says Sherri Johns, a Portland-based coffee consultant. “It should represent the place where it’s located,” she says. “I want the exact opposite of Starbucks.” She prefers cafes with strong character, such as San Francisco Coffee in Kuala Lumpur, where the people-watching never grows dull, and the Pierre Loti Cafe, perched above the Bosporus in Istanbul, with spectacular views and memorable Turkish coffee.

Still, Johns says that people all over the world “associate coffee with comfort and familiarity,” which can make Starbucks an attractive option in even the most far-flung places. Though I tend to avoid Starbucks when I travel, I can see the appeal. After all, it is reliable and everywhere. The coffee company that started in 1971 with a shop in Seattle’s Pike Place Market now has 1,100 stores in such countries as Kuwait, South Korea, Indonesia and Switzerland. The company says there will be Starbucks coffee shops in Greece by the end of the year.

But Mark Pendergrast, the author of “Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World” (Basic Books, 1999), doesn’t think travelers will be lingering any time soon over Starbucks coffee beverages in Italy, the bastion of espresso.

Italians seem to me the world’s most stylish and addicted java drinkers, stopping half a dozen times a day at coffee and sandwich bars. I love to see them leaning casually there, stirring sugar into a demitasse and downing the contents in two gulps. Most of these cafes also have table service, but you pay dearly for it, which is why you can usually tell the tourists from the locals by who’s standing and who’s sitting.

The Illy cafe in the northern Italian town of Trieste is revered for espresso, and Tazza d’Oro near the Pantheon in Rome serves a nonpareil granita di caffe, or coffee ice with whipped cream.

You can’t always predict where you’ll find a good cup of coffee. Connoisseurs like Richard Healy, owner of the Coffee Roaster in Sherman Oaks, think the French drink some of the world’s worst coffee, despite the reputation of the French cafe. Author Pendergrast contends that, until recently, it was hard to find a decent cup in such producer countries as Brazil and Costa Rica because the best beans were exported.

I love the coffee at Bewley’s in downtown Dublin and used to frequent a Latin American restaurant called El Viejo Yayo in Brooklyn with an old, encrusted and fuming espresso machine that made a caffe latte I can still taste.

For flavor, Healy advises travelers to go to Northern Europe, which has had a lock on high-grade coffee importing since the Middle Ages. Some say the European-style coffeehouse was born in Vienna, and the coffee in Northern Europe is “lightly roasted, more complex and chemically stronger,” Healy says. Come to think of it, I’ve had some of my favorite cups at cafes in Amsterdam, Brussels and Copenhagen.

Other Northern European locales even have coffee museums, such as the Speicherstadtmuseum in the northern German city of Hamburg, devoted to coffee, tea and other imports from former European colonies. Butlers Wharf on the south side of the Thames River in central London is the site of the Bramah Museum of Tea and Coffee.

It’s not just about the taste of the coffee, as most travelers know. Some cafes, like Les Deux Magots, where Ernest Hemingway drank in Paris, and the Cafe Terrace on the Place du Forum in the French town of Arles, the model for the “night cafe” painted by Van Gogh in 1888, are tourist sites in themselves and are thus hard to avoid, even if they serve despicable brew.

Others are in the places tourists want to see, like Gambrinus on the Piazza Trieste e Trento in Naples, just across from the Palazzo Reale. The central squares in Marrakech and Oaxaca, Mexico, and Central Park South in New York are lined with cafes serving indifferent coffee but offering a seat at the center of the action for premium prices.

I usually start out at such places, but as my stay in a city unfolds, I seek smaller, less expensive, more idiosyncratic cafes. My current favorites are Kost Bar in Copenhagen for great coffee and serious-looking Danes, Scaturchio on the Piazza San Domenico Maggiore in Naples for baba au rhum, and Patisserie Claude in Greenwich Village for brioche and eavesdropping. I could go back to Copenhagen, Naples or New York just for these places. It makes me jittery just to think about it.