Starbucks in Paris?
What would Sartre say?

BY MATTHEW KAMINSKI
Friday, January 23, 2004 12:01 a.m.

PARIS--Predictably, the graffiti artist didn't wait long. The bright green
Starbucks advertising poster was defiled by black spray paint--or
embellished, depending on one's point of view--hours after the maiden coffee
shop opened here.
Over the past week, concerns about the arrival of the Seattle java giant
filtered their way through the media. The usual French suspects talked about
Simone and Jean-Paul and their smart set turning in their graves at the
sight of the latest American cultural invasion. And just how do we know
Starbucks won't feed us American Frankenfood?
Yet the English-speaking denizens were even more exercised. "Is this the
final fall of French civilization?" asked Theodore Dalrymple, a recent exile
to France, only half in jest in the Times (of London). Jeffrey the New
Yorker, a writer-in-Paris acquaintance of mine, pledged to throw a brick
through the window. In case Jeffrey makes good on the threat, I'll leave out
his full name.

The Anglo-Saxon rage makes perfect sense. No self-respecting Hemingway
wannabe would be caught dead near Starbucks. Tales of a misspent Parisian
youth can't be built around a 7,000-strong food chain from back home. The
mythology of Paris--above all, it's not America--is why we come. As a
teenager, I spent my first days in Paris wandering around the cafes on
Montparnasse, re-creating scenes from "The Sun Also Rises."
Nostalgic for a past I never knew, I decided this week that the only
antidote to the Starbucks menace lay in paying a visit to Le Flore, a great
old temple of the Left Bank cafe scene. Founded in 1890, it counted Albert
Camus, the poet Jacques Prévert and, famously, Jean-Paul Sartre among its
regulars. "Existentialism was born in this room," says the menu, embellished
by a quote from the philosophe: "The paths of liberty pass through Le
Flore." It doesn't sound as if Sartre had many existential doubts himself.
As I sat down, a smiling waiter arrived and cracked a joke. When I asked
about Starbucks, he genially answered: "No problem for us, Le Flore is Le
Flore." My $15 salad of mayo and ham and my $5 coffee came promptly. What's
wrong with this picture? No self-respecting Parisian would pay $5 for a
café. Some years back, it turns out, Le Flore was sold for a bundle,
capitalizing on Sartre cachet. Just like Les Deux Magots next door, it is a
museum-piece preserve of tourists and local fashionistas.
The steady decline of French cafe culture predates Starbucks by about five
decades. The number of cafes--which, for the record, serve more wine than
coffee--topped out at about a half million before World War II, before
television and bigger apartments gave the French something else to do. Today
the dirty secret is that the coffee often resembles "sock juice"--the old
French slur against the American variety--and establishments are uniformly
drab. At the Starbucks opening, co-founder Howard Schultz told me the old
cafe just isn't "as relevant" to French life as before.
Of course, the exception is my own neighborhood joint, two blocks from the
gleaming Starbucks. Hiding from the drizzle yesterday morning, I ducked in
for a $1 espresso. Barely visible through a fog of smoke, the patronne--the
owner and soul of any cafe--laughed away my earnest concern for her future
prosperity. "We're not similar at all to Starbucks," she said. "My clients
don't want their coffee in a paper cup"--nor, I added, want to fork over $2
for a Starbucks espresso or give up tobacco.

Over at Starbucks itself, the native gets an early shock. "What's your first
name?" asked the cashier, all molars, ready to scribble it on a paper cup.
"So you get your order without a problem," she often had to explain.
Fortunately, Starbucks dumped its silly names for sizes here; imagine a
Frenchman ordering a "grande latte." But some priceless American touches
remain. A croissant, a sign informs its customers, goes real well with café
au lait. Gee, merci, Howard. "There's a lot to learn," said a bemused
Frenchman stirring his latte next to me.
In the March 1988 Gourmet, Irene Corbally Kuhn wrote that "Paris is a place
where habit dominates perhaps more than in any other major metropolis." But
in my unscientific surveys, the great attraction of Starbucks is: It's
different! This monster of American homogeneity breaks the mold of the
homogenized French cafe. Starbucks is, dare I say it, cool here.
The Colette clothing store, "a temple of chic and snobbery" (Les Echos),
offers Starbucks coffees and teas to its jet-set clientele. Le Figaro found
the news "painful." The newspaper needn't worry. If outlets mushroom, as
planned, it's hard to imagine that Starbucks will keep its chic.
Mr. Kaminski is an editorial page writer for The Wall Street Journal Europe.

Copyright © 2004 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved.

"Schizoid Man" wrote in message
...
Starbucks in Paris?
What would Sartre say?

What's the big deal? McDonald's invaded Paris over 30 years ago.

Oh, that's right - it's coffee - as in cafe!

If I were a Parisian right now I'd be more worried about getting mad cow
disease from a Big Mac.