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Coffee - it's more than a drink, it's a lifestyle!

© Sonia Michaels

Coffee. Espresso (doppio!). Caffe Latte. Café au Lait. Cappucino, per favore. Café con leche, por favor. As you can tell, most of my language skills involve the ordering of this beverage, and I'll willingly admit to being a bit of a "coffee snob" - a trait bred in me during rainy Seattle winters (and springs, and falls...) during the 80's, when I was a not-quite-starving university student living just a couple of blocks away from one of the first Starbucks' in town - or in the world, for that matter. Now, my vocabulary has expanded along with the repertoire of the coffee bars I frequent - I can now order drinks and concoctions that sound mildly Mediterranean, even though they are completely unheard of in Italy, France, or Spain. Face it, if you put "-cino" after almost any word, it's going to sound quasi-Italian, much in the same way that "saurus" gives any proper noun a soupcon of Jurassic flair (and silliness...).

But there's much more to being a connoisseur - serious or otherwise - of coffee than knowing how to confound your local barista with an order for a non-fat decaf mocha (otherwise known as a "why bother" in many circles, I hear.) Some coffee drinkers are like serious wine drinkers - they pride themselves on being able to tell Sumatran from Guatemalan, blindfolded at twenty paces, or on knowing exactly how many seconds and how much thumb pressure it takes to get the perfect grind for their three hundred dollar coffee machines. For others, though, coffee is a state of mind. I don't mean the "give me caffeine or my world will end" state of mind - though I've been there before, and I'll almost certainly find myself there again one day - but the pleasant, blissed-out state one can get into while enjoying a good cup of coffee in a good place on a good (or not-so-good but improving) day. Many of my favorite travel memories involve coffee-related experiences, and many of my favorite recipes benefit from the addition of a shot of espresso.

In many Mediterranean cities, the aroma of good coffee is almost as omnipresent as the far less pleasant moped fumes and cigarette smoke. It drifts from coffee bars, restaurant patios, and roasters, enticing passers-by inside for a hot drink or a pound of fresh-roasted coffee beans. To the Mediterranean coffee drinker, a cup of American instant coffee, or a wilting paper cup of over-stewed brew from a doughnut shop percolator, just isn't in the same league as real coffee. Even the coffee vending machines in railway stations spit out decent cups of coffee - perhaps not café-quality, but certainly better than what passes for coffee in much of North America. Don't get me wrong - bad coffee has its place in my heart, too. I have spent a lot of long nights and early mornings drinking coffee at 24 hour restaurants, and some of the sweetest memories I have of my teen years are permeated by the after-taste of Denny's "bottomless" cups of coffee!

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