Café Society

Al fresco dining in its 25th big century

by Dennis Bartel

The summer is on high. Time to scoot out to the outdoor café, lounge with a book, a pita pocket and a bottle of retsina, and admire the parade of Burghers passing in the sunshine. ‘Tis a long tradition, this outdoor dining. And because summer is for history, leave us to learn something of tradition. Here be a few great highlights in the great history of outdoor cafés.

 

Plutarch and dining friends

Athens, 414 B.C., the Periclean Age. Unlike those solitudinous Corinthians, Athenians always dine with company. (Dining alone, as Greece’s fav historian Plutarch will later say, “is not dining but feeding.”) Accordingly, Aristophanes takes his dejeuner each midday in the company of friends (the poet Bacchylides, the artist Phidias and a few Greek yoyos who won’t make the history books), at a public tetragon in the shadow of the Odeum, or Hall of Song, where he (Aristophanes) tries out the salient points of his new comedy The Birds. His friends dig it.

 

Mary, Queen of Scots, with club

Scotland, 1552. St. Andrew’s Golf club is founded, and Mary, Queen of Scots, becomes the first known lady golfer. Following her round, Mary dines on the traditional “hunt lunch” of braised mutton and gossip’s cup while sitting on the veranda overlooking the 18th green. Her score goes unreported.

 

Leipzig, 1842. Robert Schumann, already suffering bouts of melancholia and a mysterious itching, frequents his favorite café every afternoon, Fishcerhause (Fisherman’s Cottage) which in warm weather protrudes beyond its enclosed confines to abut the cobblestone street. Watching the passing philistines and scratching, Schumann absently consumes Hassenpfeller and several Bavarian beers; and mentally combs through last night’s tortured compositional labors, refining his chamber music – the three String Quartets, Op.41, the Piano Quartet, Op.47, and the Piano Quintet, Op.44. The proprietor knows to send the bill to Clara each time Schumann, lost in his dreamy zeitgeist, leaves without remembering to pay.

 

Brooklyn, 1844. Jules Janin becomes the first writer to report to Americans on Parisian sidewalk cafés, in The American In Paris, During The Summer (Burgess, Stringer & Co): “We were upon the threshold of the Café Procope – calm, silent and supped, like all cafés in Paris. It is almost deserted; two disciples of Hippocrates are playing dominos with a more important air than if they were settling the destinies of an empire. Piled upon a marble table, lie unhonored all the newspapers of the week. To the Café Procope resorted, as to a common rendezvous of wit, eloquence, and vivacity, the men, who, in their day, have overthrown a religion and a monarchy, Voltaire, Piron, Diderot, d’Alembert, and sometimes J.J. Rousseau himself, when overcoming is natural timidity, he dared to meet the rapture, wit, and raillery of these men. And of all the intellect expended in the Café Procope, what now remains? A glass of eau sucree, a marble table, and a game of dominos!”

 

Gurdjieff

St. Petersburg, 1915. George Ivanovich Gurdjieff, “The Russian Rabelais,” regularly holds court at a sidewalk café. He is dressed in a black overcoat with a velvet collar and a black bowler hat. He insults his group of followers (pasty-faced ascetics, all), toasting them with Armagnac and calling them “prime fools, squared fools, cubed fools, and idiots.” He dispenses his strange amalgamation of Far-and-Near Eastern folk art, meditation, Russian Orthodox Christianity, and “detoxification techniques.” He encounters Peter Ouspensky and together they set out developing the Gurdjieff system of Esoteric Christianity. It will remain an enigma for decades.

 

Pittsburgh, 1985. The outdoor café is no longer a sanctum sanctorum for the intellectually rigorous, or for haunted romantics, or disciples of Hippocrates, but is a place for all to meet and gossip and watch the city pass on a ribbon of sunshine. Hence, it is prudent for the Department of Planning to pass Amendment 587 to the Pittsburgh Zoning Code, Title Nine, thus creating a Special Exception for authorization of sidewalk cafés. Now, restaurants throughout the city are free to set up tables and chairs and break out the poached salmon with watercress mousseline, provided that, says the Department of Planning, ”the sidewalk café area is separated from the pedestrian passageway by a barrier approximately three feet and removed when the café is closed, and that the café service in no way endangers the health, safety, or welfare of the public.” Sounds reasonable enough, but shouldn’t the D of P include a clause safeguarding the outdoor café’s wild ivy romance, its tradition of unruly acumen, its calling for endangering the health, safety, and welfare of social laissez faire? Break down the barriers, uncork the wine! Check out this girl coming up the sidewalk.