The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Writers write in cafes. There are cafes and writers to prove this – Hemingway in La Coupole in Montparnasse, Paris; Sartre over at the Deux Magots in St Germain. A little closer to our own times, Francis Ford Coppola took his typewriter into the Vesuvio café in San Francisco’s Italian North Beach neighbourhood and knocked out the script of The Godfather.

Cafes are appealing because they provide a sense of companionship without the demands of conversation. To the chair-bound, office-bound writer even the excuse of a walk to the corner coffee shop and a look at all the strange old human faces encountered along the way is like a small holiday from black words on white paper.

But these days cafes are too noisy to write anything more challenging than a shopping list. In London, I’ve fought and abandoned the battle of blaring music in more Café Costas, Coffee Republics and charming little neighbourhood coffee shops than I care to count. So when I learned of a peaceful place here in Vancouver, I cycled over, laptop precariously perched in my bicycle basket.

The café in question had opened up on a tree-lined street alongside a map shop, a pet shop, a thrift shop, a very posh restaurant, a cheaper Greek restaurant, two florists and an arthouse cinema. And, most important of all, right across from the ubiquitous Starbucks.

A glance across the street tells me Starbucks is full and my new café is virtually empty. The same glance tells me that Starbucks looks the same as it does everywhere else and that the newcomer looks just as good, just as cosy and colourful and even has a fireplace with a log fire glowing in the back wall.

The café is owned by a Chinese couple in their thirties. The wife takes my complicated order - a non-fat, decaf cappuccino with just a little foam- with great care and tells me that I can bring it back if I’m not happy with the results. Two more customers wander in. The café provides newspapers and magazines and comfortable armchairs that look out of the window onto the crowd thronging into Starbucks across the road.

I take my coffee and settle in by the fire. There is just the faintest classical music playing behind the crackle of burning logs. I write peacefully for about ten minutes, then look up in the hope that this kind couple’s establishment will have filled, or even gained one new client. It hasn’t. There’s a queue at the counter across the street at the establishment that I will no longer name.

Only one of the two earlier customers remains. He ordered the cheapest of coffees and is lingering over it in a corner. The wife comes out from behind the counter and approaches me. “I’ve made some cheesecake. Would you like some – compliments of the house?”
I don’t usually eat cake in the morning but don’t want to hurt her feelings so I accept but as I dig my fork into the cake, I notice that the gelatine hasn’t quite dissolved. It has settled in chewy lumps all through the cream cheese mixture. I wonder if I should tell her but she is in the other corner now, offering cake to the man whom I have come to think of as the lone, cheap customer.

If I leave the cake that too will hurt her feelings so I wrap it in my napkin and slip it into my bag. Now, despite the perfect peace, I am distracted from writing by the small family business that is unraveling into failure before my eyes. The husband is making small talk with that lone man, working hard at appearing genial and finding topics that interest his customer. The wife is arranging her cakes, gazing from time to time at the door but nobody comes in.

I’ve forgotten all thoughts of writing and am now preoccupied with that sad little array of cakes in the display case. Did the gelatine fail to melt in all of them? The chocolate caramel shortbread looks hopeful. Should I abandon all rules about sugar in the morning and order a slice just to encourage this kind, hard working, worried woman?

That’s a step too far for me but I do make a point of complimenting her on the peaceful music as she passes. “We like it too,” she says, but her gaze drifts back to the empty doorway

Soon I can linger no longer. The emptiness is starting to gnaw away at me. That writer’s impossible need for convivial, quiet company can’t be fulfilled here. I leave the café and head home for lunch.

A week later I find the moldy cake at the bottom of my cycle bag. I resolve to ride by the café each day, trying to believe that I will find it busy and bustling. Each day I find it as empty as the next. I want to walk across the street to the other place and ask all those disloyal locals why they flock to this banal American chain instead of supporting a small business. But I lack the courage for confrontations.

Then I come up with another solution. I will contact the woman who writes the restaurant column in the local paper and suggest that she write a feature on peaceful cafes, giving prominence to this one. But life intervenes, I myself have a feature to write, a friend visits from out of town and I want to take her to busy, bustling, positive places and the sad café gets forgotten.

Soon, I feel so guilty about what I now perceive to be my own failure in helping these people survive, that I can no longer cycle along that charming street. These days I make a detour along a parallel residential street. Then I'm gone, back in Europe for the winter. When I return to BC i in the spring, I ride a bus in from the airport. One glance tells me that the cafe wilted and died. An Indian restaurant has taken its place. The owner sits at a table by the window, studying his accounts and staring out at Starbucks where a line has formed at the counter.