A French Café Is Not a Coffee Shop

Walk into a place marked "café" in France and you may be in for a surprise. There's no iced Americano, and the staff may even look at you strangely for asking. That's because a French café isn't the coffee shop you have in mind. Does that mean France has no stylish coffee shops with a wide range of drinks and latte art? Of course it does. The coffee served in those places is called Le café de spécialité in French, or specialty coffee in English. In this guide, we'll call it premium coffee. These specialists are carefully orchestrated from bean selection through blending and brewing. But premium coffee shops have only become popular in France in the last ten years or so, and as tastes have grown more sophisticated, their numbers keep climbing.

So what is a French café? Think of it as a casual, relaxed restaurant that serves light meals and drinks. Because of the word café, people often mistake it for an English-style coffee shop, but it's an everyday French eatery that happens to serve drinks and coffee too. That's why the coffee there can't be compared with what you get at a specialty coffee shop. The guide says that café coffee tastes almost the same everywhere and the menu is fixed, because a very well-known coffee supplier called Cafés Richard serves many of them. Look for the Cafés Richard logo on the cups or atop the espresso machine. It's like Lavazza or Illy in Italy.

Specialty coffee is a coffee culture that began in the United States in 1982. Countries strongly influenced by American culture have plenty of it. France, on the other hand, is in Europe, right next to Italy, where coffee isn't a premium drink but simply something you have as part of a meal.

This is where French coffee culture stands apart. In some places, after a meal out you head to a nice coffee shop for round two and chat for hours. In France, as the course structure showed, you finish your main course and then have coffee with dessert or after it. Coffee is part of the whole meal, not the star, just a modest way to wrap things up. So there's no reason to leave one restaurant for another for coffee; you have dessert and coffee at the place you started. That's why you shouldn't go looking for an iced Americano in a French café.

These days, a few places do serve something like iced coffee, called café frappé. But iced coffee lives or dies by its ice, and it tends to arrive lukewarm, so you're likely to be disappointed. It would be quicker to search for the nearest big coffee chain.