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Where there is no law, but every man does what is right in his own eyes, there is the least of real liberty
Henry M. Robert

Putting in a Good Word for Coffee

13 November, 2012 - 00:00

“Coffee, coffee, coffee,” hummed Vitya, a friend of mine, meaningfully nudging me with his elbow: I and his fellow student were about to begin a romance.

A coffee bar, nothing but a coffee bar could be our meeting place.

Though the bar has changed its signboard two times since then and nothing left from my romance, the coffee was delicious, no comparison to that we drink today.

People nowadays do not say to one another: “Let’s meet over a cup of coffee,” though no taboo has been imposed on drinking this colonial product. The techniques of preparing coffee are the same, only the tastes of the youth have changed. They show more preference for Rum-Cola and Gin-Tonic which do not need a ritual of tasting, special cups, and pots.

Coffee drinking involved other temptations that have become outdated: cognac is available in such quantities at food stores that there is no point in adding a standard 50 grams to a portion. The same holds true with liqueurs. The 1990s saw an unexplained heyday of Amaretto (85% of Amaretto brands on sale are homemade), followed by its swift decline which put an end to the tradition of flavoring coffee with liqueur. Of course, people like to drink coffee now too but how do they do it? In underground passages, hastily, burning themselves. What was once a solemn ritual has become ordinary.

As a matter of fact, coffee bars were our universities. It mattered little for us that their interiors were dull and the visitors were often occasional people. (Of course it was not Sartre’s company in Paris) Social life seethed at coffee bars, splashing outside into the nearby boulevards and public gardens. There coffee fans used to exchange the latest news or a book by Hesse and debated themselves hoarse on the destinies of the mankind. Coffee bars were sometimes the places where lovers’ hearts were broken.

After two or three doubles topped with a glass of cheap Slynchev Briag brandy, one of us ran to a nearby food store for another bomb. And life seemed sweet as could be. The most frequented places at the time were Hvylynka (currently called Kobza) on Velyka Zhytomyrska Street, a coffee shop in Lvivska Square (now closed), Shanghai or Bunker (a basement with a music juke box recently converted into a tavern), Zatyshok (in perpetual repairs) on the former Karl Marx Street, and, of course, the glass box in the tube under Independence Square, Khreshchatyk’s underground passage. In other words, the coffee ceremony, unlike the oriental tea ceremony, was in Soviet times a temporary but safe surrogate for the internal immigration of our intellectuals. Without coffee neither Ukrainian literature nor politics were possible. The elegant coffee bars of Lviv and its region are perhaps the only strong argument cited by Yuri Andrukhovych in his Moskoviada in support of the opinion that our culture has an edge over the culture of old-fashioned Russia. Coffee fantasies permeate verses by our modern poets: “You are as dark as Turkish coffee...” (Viktor Neborak). “I am going to weep and laugh, wearing my pants to holes in a coffee bar.” (Yuri Pozayak).

The advent of instant coffee, so enthusiastically advertised, was the major cause of the decline of “the coffee empire.”

Here is a vivid example. Some five years ago, my colleague began to collect coffee cans. Like a genuine coffee freak, he collected as many as three dozen and then quit, after realizing that his lifetime would not be enough to taste all the brands of coffee in the world. Moreover, his heart began to ache. So, he got himself a coffee pot and kept cereals and spices in his coffee cans.

A cup of coffee at home defeated the habit of drinking coffee at a bar, the same as a home video or a 12-channel television set put into a deep sleep the half-empty, cold, and comfortless movie theaters. Incidentally, a cup of coffee drunk on the town is as costly as a ticket to a movie. The girls I worked with told me that once they had dropped in at a cafe to have a cup of coffee and a tiny piece of cake. The treat cost them as much as $10. Disappointed, they fled the cafe, swearing never come back. I do not know, maybe they picked the wrong place.

(Especially praised by coffee fans is a coffee shop on Pushkinska Street.) Having no opportunity to visit Zatyshok (Ukrainian for sheltered spot), many enjoy the zatyshok of their homes with a boiling coffee pot on a stove and steaming fragrant coffee for two.

Photo by Viktor Marushenko, The Day:

Artist Ivan Marchuk (left) and writer Oles Ulianenko love to sip coffee at the Dytiache Cafe on Pushkin St.

 

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