Coffeehouse

Many coffeehouses in West Asia offer shisha (actually called nargile in Levantine Arabic, Greek, and Turkish), flavored tobacco smoked through a hookah.

[17] The translingual word root /kafe/ appears in many European languages with various naturalized spellings, including Portuguese, Spanish, and French (café); German (Kaffee); Polish (kawa); Serbian (кафа / kafa); Ukrainian (кава, 'kava'); and others.

Coffeehouses became popular meeting places where people gathered to drink coffee, have conversations, play board games such as chess and backgammon, listen to stories and music, and discuss news and politics.

A molla will stand up in the middle, or at one end of the qahveh-khaneh, and begin to preach in a loud voice, or a dervish enters all of a sudden, and chastises the assembled on the vanity of the world and its material goods.

[26] The traditional tale of the origins of the Viennese café begins with the mysterious sacks of green beans left behind when the Turks were defeated in the Battle of Vienna in 1683.

This special multicultural atmosphere of the Habsburg coffee houses was largely destroyed by the later National Socialism and Communism and can only be found today in a few places that have long been in the slipstream of history, such as Vienna or Trieste.

[44] Though Charles II later tried to suppress London coffeehouses as "places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers", the public still flocked to them.

[46] By 1739, there were 551 coffeehouses in London; each attracted a particular clientele divided by occupation or attitude, such as Tories and Whigs, wits and stockjobbers, merchants and lawyers, booksellers and authors, men of fashion or the "cits" of the old city center.

In Victorian England, the temperance movement set up coffeehouses (also known as coffee taverns) for the working classes, as a place of relaxation free of alcohol, an alternative to the public house.

[48][49] In 1667, Kara Hamie, a former Ottoman Janissary from Constantinople, opened the first coffee shop in Bucharest (then the capital of the Principality of Wallachia), in the center of the city, where today sits the main building of the National Bank of Romania.

[50] Pasqua Rosée, an Armenian by the name Harutiun Vartian, also established the first coffeehouse in Paris in 1672 and held a citywide coffee monopoly until Procopio Cutò, his apprentice, opened the Café Procope in 1686.

[51] This coffeehouse still exists today and was a popular meeting place of the French Enlightenment; Voltaire, Rousseau, and Denis Diderot frequented it, and it is arguably the birthplace of the Encyclopédie, the first modern encyclopedia.

In the 18th century, Dublin coffeehouses functioned as early reading centers and the emergence of circulation and subscription libraries that provided greater access to printed material for the public.

The name café has also come to be used for a type of diners that offers cooked meals (again, without alcoholic beverages) which can be standalone or operating within shopping centres or department stores.

[59] In a well-known engraving of a Parisian café c. 1700,[60] the gentlemen hang their hats on pegs and sit at long communal tables strewn with papers and writing implements.

[61] In most European countries, such as Spain, Austria, Denmark, Germany, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, and others, the term café means a restaurant primarily serving coffee, as well as pastries such as cakes, tarts, pies, or buns.

[citation needed] In 1966, Alfred Peet began applying the dark roast style to high quality beans and opened up a small shop in Berkeley, California to educate customers on the virtues of good coffee.

They were often storefronts and had names like The Lost Coin (Greenwich Village), The Gathering Place (Riverside, CA), Catacomb Chapel (New York City), and Jesus For You (Buffalo, NY).

Christian music (often guitar-based) was performed, coffee and food was provided, and Bible studies were convened as people of varying backgrounds gathered in a casual setting that was purposefully different from traditional churches.

Computers and Internet access in a contemporary-styled venue help to create a youthful, modern place, compared to the traditional pubs or old-fashioned diners that they replaced.

[75] In China, an abundance of recently started domestic coffeehouse chains may be seen accommodating business people for conspicuous consumption, with coffee prices sometimes even higher than in the West.

Menus typically feature simple offerings: a variety of foods based on egg, toast, and coconut jam, plus coffee, tea, and Milo, a malted chocolate drink that is extremely popular in Southeast Asia and Australasia, particularly Singapore and Malaysia.

There are also a number of establishments often referred to as "cafés" that serve not just coffee and pastries, but full meals, often international cuisine highly altered to Filipino tastes.

[77] In Thailand, the term "café" is not only a coffeehouse in the international definition, as in other countries, but in the past was considered a night restaurant that serves alcoholic drinks during a comedy show on stage.

[78] The first real coffeehouse in Thailand opened in 1917 at the Si Kak Phraya Si in the area of Rattanakosin Island, by Madam Cole, an American woman who living in Thailand at that time, Later, Chao Phraya Ram Rakop (เจ้าพระยารามราฆพ), Thai aristocrat, opened a coffeehouse named "Café de Norasingha" (คาเฟ่นรสิงห์) located at Sanam Suea Pa (สนามเสือป่า), the ground next to the Royal Plaza.

In Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, independent coffeehouses that struggled prior to 1991 have become popular with young professionals who do not have time for traditional coffee roasting at home.

[85][86] The patrons of the first coffeehouse in England, The Angel, which opened in Oxford in 1650,[87] and the mass of London coffee houses that flourished over the next three centuries, were far removed from those of modern Britain.

Haunts for teenagers in particular, Italian-run espresso bars and their formica-topped tables were a feature of 1950s Soho that provided a backdrop as well as a title for Cliff Richard's 1960 film Expresso Bongo.

North American espresso bars were also at the forefront of widespread adoption of public WiFi access points to provide Internet services to people doing work on laptop computers on the premises.

The offerings at the typical espresso bar are generally quite Italianate in inspiration; biscotti, cannoli and pizzelle are a common traditional accompaniment to a caffe latte or cappuccino.