Thursday, January 13, 2011

Spoons Plates and One Significant Orto

I was enjoying a brief moment of peace last Saturday morning in a particularly nice local Starbucks, when I realized there was something missing.  So obviously missing it was hard to believe that I was drinking coffee and eating a scone in what was trying to be a café.


I recently returned from Florence, Italy, where I consumed more cups of cappuccino in nine days than I have in the past five years, maybe ten.  Each morning began with a cup and saucer of coffee, piled with creamy foam, in the brightly lit dining room on the mezzanine level of the Orto de’ Medici hotel.  Orto means garden, and the significance of this garden is this:  Lorenzo the Magnificent, the Medici who fathered the Italian renaissance and who owned this building 525 years ago in which he placed an arts school, first met a certain Michelangelo Buonarotti there when the latter was a young teenager and new student of the arts.  The young Michelangelo impressed, and was immediately adopted into the House of Medici, and here we are today still ogling at the works of this master.


A morning cup of coffee in this scene is dazzling, even in the daze of jetlag.  Before the caffeine hits you, though, what really wakes you up is the sound.


The sound of metal spoons clinking on ceramic saucers. 


Firenze Breakfast



Walk into a real café anywhere, and you hear the din of people, orders, and production.  This is an orchestra of the murmur of friends catching up with the day’s news, events, and gossip accented by the sound of orders for a cappuccino or espresso, the airy, pent-up sound of the steamer, and the banging of the machinery, all punctuated by the frequent and high-pitched clinks of metal spoons on ceramic plates.  This last sound we take for granted, and may not even notice until we feel its absence.


Which is precisely what happened in the Starbucks.  In this “café,” we drank from paper cups!  Nibbled pastries from paper bags!  I felt robbed, duped, degraded.  Sure, there was the signature aroma of coffee.  The furniture was very nice, small wooden cafe and family-style bench tables, a few leather lounge chairs.  But the essence, the energy, of Café was absent.  There was hardly any noise.  Conversations were a low hum of chitter-chatter.  Every so often, I heard the thud of the espresso filter emptying its soggy grinds against the rim of a trash bin.  


This experience fell short of the Florentine café culture, where the symphony of sound reverberates, penetrates, and uplifts, where conversations are alive and impassioned, where  crowds form at the counters to shout orders, where people kiss and hug, even though they just saw each other yesterday, and where the sound of metal spoons clinking against plates binds and elevates the energy of The Café.


There's more to it than caffeine.


1 comment:

SheWyro said...

The other thing missing from Starbucks is the smell of coffee ironically! You should go to Rulli in Larkspur for coffee...real china and great joe!