Coffee house
A coffeehouse shares some of the characteristics of a café or a bar, but does not emphasize alcoholic beverages; typically, it does not offer alcoholic beverages at all, focusing instead on coffee and perhaps tea and hot chocolate. Other food may range from baked goods to soups and sandwiches, and other casual meals.
In Persia, since the 16th century, the coffeehouse (qahveh-khaneh) has served as a social gathering place where men assemble to drink coffee or tea, listen to music, play chess and backgammon., perhaps hear a recitation from the Shahnameh. In modern Iran, the coffeehouses may attract a male crowd to watch the public TV.
The traditional tale of the beginnings of Viennese coffeehouses from the mysterious sacks of green beans left behind when the Turks failed in their siege of Vienna in 1683, offered to the Viennese by a knowing Turkish-speaking Pole named Kolschitzky is often retold. It has the ring of apochrypa to skeptics who find the story too pat— and the date too late.
Coffeehouses first became popular in Europe upon the introduction of coffee in the 17th century. The first London coffeehouse opened in 1652. Though Charles II later tried to suppress them as "places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers," (a criticism that is still valid), the public flocked to them. They quickly became meeting places where business could be carried on, news exchanged and the gazettes read. By 1739 there were 551 coffeehouses in London, including meeting places for Tories and Whigs, people of fashion or the "cits" of the old city center, coffeehouses known as gathering-places for the wits or for stockjobbers, merchants and lawyers, booksellers and authors. According to one French visitor, the Abbé Prévost, coffeehouses, "where you have the right to read all the papers for and against the government," were the "seats of English liberty."
Ladies were not permitted in coffeehouses. In a well-known engraving of a Parisian coffeehouse of ca 1700, the gentlemen hang their hats on pegs and sit at long communal tables strewn with papers and writing implements. Coffeepots are ranged at an open fire, with a hanging cauldron of boiling water. The only woman present presides, decently separated in a canopied booth, whence she doles out coffee in tall cups.
In London, coffeehouses preceded the clubs of the mid-18th century, which skimmed away some of the more aristocratic clientele. Lloyd's of London started in a coffeehouse. Auctions in salesrooms attached to coffeehouses provided the start for the great auction houses of Sotheby's and Christie's. In New York the Tontine Coffeehouse at the foot of Wall Street near the docks became a central meeting place. In small cities a coffeehouse functioned as a place where messages might be left and picked up.
The current spate of chain coffeehouses such as Starbucks have a clear lineal descent from the espresso and pastry centered Italian coffeehouses of the Italian-American immigrant communities in the major US cities, notably New York City's Little Italy and Greenwich Village, Boston's North End, and San Francisco's North Beach. Both Greenwich Village and North Beach were major haunts of the Beats, who became highly identified with these coffeehouses. As the youth culture of the 1960s evolved, non-Italians consciously copied these coffeehouses. Before the rise of the Seattle-based Starbucks chain, Seattle had a thriving largely countercultural coffeehouse scene; Starbucks cleaned up, standardized, genericized, and "mainstreamed" this model.
The liquor laws in many areas in the United States generally prevent anyone under the age of 21 from entering bars, so coffeehouses in that country can often be important youth gathering places.
Since approximately the Beat era, the term coffeehouse has come to imply the availability of espresso drinks, and while "coffee shop" still could suggest an establishment where one would buy coffee, there has been an evolution so that it now suggests diner more than coffee-drinking hang-out per se.
Starting in the 1980s, a counter clerk in a coffeehouse has come to be known in English as a barista, from the Italian word for bartender.
The contemporary coffeehouse is just the latest example of a drinking establishment--bars, public houses, taverns and soda shops have also served this purpose--as the center for cultural exchange in a particular community, often fomenting social and political change. See, for example, the meetings of the Sons of Liberty of the American Revolution and the Beer Hall Putsch.
In the Netherlands, coffee shop is a euphemistic name for an establishment where marijuana can be purchased semi-legally. See Drugs policy of the Netherlands.
See also Café, Public house
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