The Café Scene: Rare In Boston

There is little or no café scene in Boston- at least not like one might find in European cities, because the majority of cafés are coffee shops owned by corporations. To understand what the difference is between a café and a coffee shop one has to examine the differences between the two. Both serve coffee and teas, perhaps pastries, both have a place to sit and relax, and perhaps play music or offer magazines to purchase and read, but one has to ask what does a café have or do that a coffee shop does not?

A true café is unique- it is not a chain owned by a corporation, and no other café like it can be found elsewhere. Starbucks, a coffee shop that imitates a café style on a corporate level is not a true café. The reason for this is simple. A true café is not only a purveyor of coffee and teas, but a purveyor of a distinct culture through its food and coffee. When one enters a true café, the feeling is unmistakable: it is a feeling of authenticity based upon a personal vision of the owners and staff that immediately embraces one. You have found yourself in a place created especially for you at one location. A true café embraces a feeling of culture, time, tradition, and permanence. A true cafe has provenance gained through years of customer loyalty.

In Boston, Café Vittori in the North End is an example of a true café- it is a family café that has been nurtured over years, and although it is not what one might call an arts café, it possesses the visitor with its identity, serves great café and pastries, has a staff that is culturally unique, and has the necessary hominess that corporations strive to imitate, but never will succeed at doing because of the uniform culture of corporate America. Where I live in South Boston there is only one coffee shop that can aspire to the level of café, and that is the Cranberry Café on East Broadway. It does not fit the ideal of a true café, but it comes closer than most others. It is above a coffee shop because the help cares, and it has a coziness that is almost just right. Somehow it lacks the cultural part to make its atmosphere comfortable enough for lounging- it might be considered a commuter café.

One aspect of a true café is that it eschews the paper cup. Although even the best café will serve coffee in a paper cup to people who are not staying, it does not serve coffee in paper cups inside its doors unless requested. By definition a true café serves its side dishes or pastries on real plates, with heavy gauge flatware. The coffee production is an intensely public effort, so that grinding and roasting are a routine part of the process. The center of the café is consumed with offering a variety of fine coffees and teas, housed in appealing containers, only available to the service to dispense. People don’t wait upon themselves at a line in a counter unless they are taking something to go, because in a true café, they are served by real waiters. This staffing aspect, combined with the unusually high price of real estate in Boston, are the two major reasons why true cafes are so rare.

Most true cafes bake their own goods and sell caravansary products- a select group of luxury coffee and tea products, and perhaps food items that are of a distinct quality. Icons of European cafes often enter in this mix, Swiss or Belgium chocolate, French biscuits, Italian Biscotti, Danish cookies, German or Polish preserves- even going as far as to offer other gourmet food items like olives, dried peppers, smoked salmon, herring, etc. It would seem that the caravansary in the café offers a shop within a shop- a place where one might buy a few gifts for someone for a special occasion. The fact that the café carries these kinds of products signals to its consumer that it is not a coffee shop, but an experience. One goes to a true café the way one goes to events like theatre or music- as an entertainment.

This is where the culture part of a café trumps everything else. The customer has to come to the café to experience an atmosphere that takes them away from the daily grind- that offers a feeling that is unique. Many cafes have small galleries for this purpose. Although this is not necessary, it offers the café owner a way to keep the art on the walls fresh, without too much personal expense. The problem for Bostonians is that many coffee shops that are perfectly adept at shoving a coffee across the counter with a decent pastry, have no idea about art, photography, or music. A café is unique because it decides these things, and has a small group of people who provide the cultural back drop. Sometimes a café will simply import small beautiful art objects from over seas to sell as gifts and use them as decoration as well, sometimes it will offer local art and photography, but almost always there is some tangible evidence of creativity on the walls.

A real café has its own music. Many Boston establishments play the radio- often on cheap boom boxes placed on top of the refrigerator. What separates a café culture from a coffee shop is that there are no commercials in a real café. Even public radio simply talks too much. There is nothing more exasperating than sitting in a coffee shop trying to read, write, or think, and to have to listen to some dumb ass disc jockey. Because the café culture is authentic it does not market to the client through advertisement, it creates a place that the client comes to for culture. In music this makes choices difficult. Americans are always surprised to hear how popular jazz is in Europe- jazz is the café music, but most Americans can only tolerate jazz vocals, and popular jazz. The same is true for classical music- there is a smaller passionate following of classical music, but it too is not seen as trend setting enough.

Corporate cafes have zeroed in on American tastes and try to offer an eclectic mix of pop, rock, jazz, and rarely classical music. Starbucks has a programmed music scheme oriented towards young people. The music in many places is too loud, and usually too jarring to be relaxing. My personal belief is that a true café seeks out the best music in a variety of styles and plays a certain kind of music chosen by the staff according to whim. Art is more often a difficult thing for cafes to pull off because it requires a small group to manage the "gallery" in the cafe. Getting superior artists to display their work is not as easy as it looks- and the physical act of creating a gallery that changes even monthly, is a bit of a challange. Unless the owner of the cafe is particularly adept at gallery management, he or she is better advised to hire an artists coop. And this brings me to perhaps the most important part of a café that separates it from a coffee shop: the staff.

The staff in a coffee shop is doing a low wage job that they cannot stand- they are merely waiting on people. The staff in a café are proud of what they do because they are in a particular kind of business- the hospitality business. Cafes hire waiters because they actively market product and promote the business, but also because they are the culture the client seeks. There has to be an allure to a café. Whether it is the music, the art on the walls, the political bent of the place, chess boards, or just great product, nothing trumps having a happy staff. Young starving artists often make great café servers, they can talk to the clients about art and culture, and they add a feeling that yes, you are not in Dunkin Donuts. But the staff not only promotes the café, they promote a kind of behavior- an ethos. A true café is both old world and modern. It is predicated upon the idea that the café is in business for the long haul, that it is part of the fabric of a neighborhood.

Because Americans have such an unbelievably low standard of dress supported by a huge inequality of income, the staff of many coffee shops shows up looking like they are in a rock video, or just off the boat from some third world culture. Everything is t-shirts and jeans. The people who tell me that how one dresses does not matter- are the same people who think that someone with a pierced tongue in a sleeveless shirt and unwashed jeans, should serve me food. The culture of vulgarity is pervasive in America, always in our faces, it needs no preservation inside the walls of a café. Besides these issues of taste, (which this writer realizes are highly subjective) the standard for dress in service in corporate driven service in America is based upon cheapness. Making people wear your logo is anti-café culture. However, it must be recognized that the hideous “uniforms” that fast food restaurants and coffee shops offer are often no less attractive than the low level of dress many independents offer trying to be “cool”. It’s nice for a wait staff to be cool, but what I really want is respectful service, thank you.


The vest and apron is most important in this scheme of dress- it signifies the waiter, separates them from the client. The problem is that acquiring a uniform look from a brand name of clothing is hard as each season fabrics and styles come and go. It would seem a tremendous burden to have vests made for the café staff, until one considers the sheer number of high quality tailors in Boston, begging for such work. Either way, the vest and scarf, or tie must be carefully matched with slacks, shirt, and shoes. The combination of black on white or cream, with a colorful tie or scarf creates a signature look that is hard to beat. When a café decides this type of thing for the staff, it is telling the client, we cared enough to create a look for our staff. Whatever one does, baseball hats are to be avoided.

Finally, the café culture needs very little marketing, and most of that occurs with well placed signage and menus. The corporate cafés market themselves very well- almost to the exclusion of service and individual identity mind you, but they are successful at one thing: creating a market for a particular type of person. The objection I’ve always had to Starbucks is that I feel too manipulated- there is a certain calculation to everything that denies café culture. It is not the price of the product, which is very high, but the fact that it isn’t really substantial enough. A study of corporate menus in this realm reveal a striking similarity among genres of coffee shops- little is playful or different. They are made for the unimaginative: there are no surprises. I am never quite left alone to experience the café at Starbucks, because there is always some marketing person trying to experience it for me.

A true café offers a world to the client that is built upon the idea that a superior product is just the beginning, and that their experience there is the reason for its being. The menu is exactly indicative of what you would expect when looking into the window of the place- and it has a name that rings when one pronounces it. When one looks into the window of a true café it presents a level of artful comfort and ease, the customer knows they can not find elsewhere. Open the door and there is a rush of aroma of fresh baked goods, combined with the pervasive smell of coffee- the light is subdued and music ushers you to a table cozy and solid, a person appears to take your order, and when it arrives it is consistently great every time. That series of events is difficult to arrange in today’s market, but it is all the marketing that is ever needed to be successful. The best compliment a café can receive is that the clients would rather walk to it, then have a cup of coffee in their own kitchens.