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Coffee

A Coffee (Café) is what the US calls an espresso. It is part of the culture here in Paris. When in doubt, have a coffee. Like salt and pepper, coffee and cigarettes are the inevitable pairing. Tired of walking around? Stop in at a café and have a café.

It has evolved, though, into specificity you would not expect. For example, if you like the more watered-down American coffee, you can order a café americain. You can have milk in your coffee, but it must be at breakfast. If you go to a café and you want milk in your coffee, you would expect that a café au lait would do the trick, but unless you want a soup bowl of coffee, better order a café creme (or for short, a creme). These soup bowls I think are going out of favor recently. I have never seen a Frenchman order or drink one and even restaurants have opted to go with the creme version when the other is ordered. Having milk in your coffee at any other meal is kind of like ordering Cheerios after your steak dinner. You can get it, but you will get looks.

There is a loophole here. You can get a Noisette at any meal, which is coffee, very sweet, with a bit of milk in it. I had heard of this and ordered it once and put in my normal one lump of sugar. It was so sweet I think I lost a tooth.

How the coffee is made has had a complete overhaul here as well. There is a coffee machine called a Nespresso that many Parisians have. It has been trying to make a dent in the US market; I have seen a Nespresso department in the kitchen gadget shop, Sur le Table. It makes a very good cup of coffee, but it is an ecological nightmare. Each cup is made from a sealed plastic cup containing just the right amount of coffee and the machine has the exact process needed. They have excellent service and you can order more of these and they are delivered within 24 hours. You can also recycle these, but Helmut says no one does that. I have a feeling that in 5 years they will have more of these cups in landfill than anything else. The marketing for these machines is done by George Clooney and these commercials have become so popular that if you want a café americain, you can order a George.

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