![]() It felt like a total anachronism - a warping of worlds. It was for this reason that I experienced quite a start upon hearing the soothing refrains of Édith Piaf’s 1960 hit “Non, je ne regrette rien” float through the chilly October air from the window of my Collegetown apartment earlier this week. It was as if these longstanding institutions were time capsules in their own right, as if their existence would remain perpetually frozen in a period so drastically different from our own era. The collection became a haphazard collection of classics studded with stars like Joséphine Baker and Brigitte Bardot, interspersed here and there with the ballads of American chanteuses like Billie Holiday and Julie London and the occasional Italian love song. In the process of seeking out pieces of music that aligned with this feeling, I found that fantasies of this glorified 1920s expatriate artistic subculture very much still colored the way I conceptualized café culture. I fell in love with the way it concretized the power of food in fostering connection while at the same time presenting itself as a vehicle for solitude, contemplation and introspection. This order served as inspiration for - and became the title of - a playlist I would later curate in an effort to encapsulate the soundtrack of a café culture I had grown to deeply admire. It leans more towards a mug of melted chocolate than an easily sippable beverage, rendering it quite the luxurious indulgence. A somewhat paradoxical relationship thus arises, in which the two archetypal Parisian cafés also happen to be the ones that provide the most manufactured experience, tailored perfectly to the tourist agenda.ĭuring my bucket-list visit to Café de Flore one day before class, I was quick to order the chocolat viennois, an incredibly rich, thick variation on hot chocolate served with a heaping side of whipped cream. The two spots have ascended into tourist-trap stardom due to their reputation as frequent workplaces of Lost Generation artistic and literary giants including but not limited to Simone de Beauvoir, Hemingway, Picasso and Joyce, earning them the right to charge eight euro for a glass of orange juice.Īlthough a plethora of less pricey options dot the neighborhood, these two have transcended any semblance of the ordinary, instead upheld as artifacts of a time when writers and painters scratched their musings down on paper and took long drags from Galoises cigarettes and pondered the fate of a world reshaped by world war (the first one, that is). ![]() The cafés sit nestled beneath green and gold awnings, an organized mess of cream-colored woven bistro chairs bustling with impeccably clad waiters. The two institutions are neighbors on a picturesque boulevard in the charming neighborhood of Saint Germain de Prés, a quartier I came to know well during my time spent studying in the city last spring. If you’ve ever had the privilege of visiting Paris, I’d be willing to bet that you enjoyed a bite to eat - or at least stopped by - one of two quintessentially Parisian cafés: Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore.
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