ERNEST Hemingway opens his memoir of 1920s Paris, “A Moveable Feast,” with a scathing description of Café des Amateurs. The evilly run café, he said, advertised aperitifs with strange names, had female rummies for customers and smelled of sweat and drunkenness. He called it the cesspool of the rue Mouffetard because like the street’s cesspool it was unpleasant and ill smelling. Unlike the street’s cesspool that was emptied each night, however, it had customers who were constant in their malodor and inebriation.
And then there’s that good café on the Place St.-Michel. The good café on the Place St.-Michel was warm and clean and friendly, and there Hemingway used to go to write. The waiter brought him familiar drinks like the café au lait and glass after glass of rum St. James, which warmed him while he wrote. He sat across girls whose beauty inspired him and his prose but which did not pressure him to make conversation and instead respected his solitude and let him alone. And then the waiter brought him, when he was finally done with writing, carafes of crisp white wine and succulent oysters that tasted of the sea in celebration of his prolificacy. Hemingway does not name the café anywhere in the book, and perhaps this is because he wanted it to remain private and quiet and truly his.
Hemingway’s preoccupation with finding a place where he can be a habitué, that secret café where he can linger with his writing and thoughts, is evident all throughout his memoir. He talks about afternoons spent in Closerie de Lilas with his young son Bumby, who behaved like an adult and sat beside him, mostly quietly, except to comment on the matters of the universe. He talks passionately, too, about how he came to abhor a café he once so loved when, one day while he was there to work, the most odious man he knew came to engage him in conversation.
What’s interesting is that Hemingway’s obsession and patience with finding a café where he could write was actually gratuitous. In fact, he rented the attic of an apartment building and used it as his office. He used it well, yes, for he wrote almost everyday, but he wrote almost everyday in cafés, too. Perhaps he saw the value of working in a café—a place that was, all at once, public and private, quiet and busy, and comfortable and uncomfortable.
Such was my goal when I moved to Katipunan a while back. I longed for a place where I could linger with my reading and work and my studio apartment was simply too quiet, too comfortable, and housed too many distractions. In a good café I find that I am all at once alone and in public. I am among strangers but solitary in my private little nook. While I cannot do most of the things that I do when I’m alone like sleeping or singing off-key, I can engage in more socially acceptable and less obtrusive activities like working and reading. And because my laptop and books are my only companions, I am forced to give them my full attention. Such is the beauty of working out of the house.
And so perhaps with Hemingway’s ardor but not his capacities for poetic insight, I proceeded to scour Katipunan for that good café. Like the one Hemingway loved on the Place St.-Michel, the good café I had in mind was warm and clean and friendly. The lighting was warm but not too bright, the place squeaky-clean but not smelling of disinfectant, and the staff cordial but not intrusive. It had electrical sockets for my laptop and offered free wi-fi. Its tables were big enough for my food, laptop, and books, and just high enough so that I could work comfortably. The chairs, on the other hand, were cozy but not sleep inducing. It had clean restrooms, of course, and offered free parking. In the background, beautiful music played—jazz, perhaps, and not too loudly for I would be working or reading my book. I loved the versatility of my café’s menu, most of all. It served everything from breakfast, lunch and tea to dinner for a reasonable price because it wanted me to linger.
I first went to the Starbucks branch at the Petron gasoline station beside Loyola Grand Villas, and for a while I was content. It was spacious enough so that the tables were not too close to one another that I am forced to eavesdrop on my neighbors’ conversations, but neither was it too big that even as I was refreshing my drink at the counter, I found that I could still easily watch over my table and things. For a while it was my café, and I came to love everything about it. The menu was quite versatile and had pastries, sandwiches, salads, and the occasional pasta. For a coffee shop, too, it had a lot of non-coffee options. I was never a coffee drinker myself and so I especially enjoyed their selection of sparkling juice, hot chocolate, and teas. For a little more than three hundred pesos, I had a drink and a pastry and was happy. The music was alright for most of the year when it played lounge music and bossa nova, but wonderful at Christmastime when they played carols while I sipped my peppermint drink and nibbled on gingerbread.
The Starbucks branch that I used to frequent had a lot of imperfections, yes, like the wi-fi service that I had to buy for a hundred pesos an hour and the absence of an in-house washroom, but the café’s friendly staff made up for them all. The moment they saw me fumbling with my laptop charger, they directed me to the socket. They decreased the air conditioning’s temperature when I looked cold. They looked over my things while I ran to the washroom outside. They let me sample new drinks when they saw that my glass was already empty.
I loved the staff, most of all, because their relationship with me seemed personal. It was not that the baristas were always happy to lend assistance and knew my name and inquired about my life and work. It was that whenever I answered their questions, they remembered. I especially loved it, too, that every time I would enter and leave the Starbucks branch that I used to frequent, the guard always greeted me with a smile, the kind that one saved for friends. I grew to treasure my familiarity with him so much that when a different guard received me into the doors one day and for weeks after that, I felt genuinely sad because I knew that I lost a fellow.
It was when the romantic relationship I had with someone ended that I stopped frequenting that Starbucks branch. I was with someone new and whenever he would meet me in the café, I saw the friendly staff talk and wonder about what happened to me and why it ended and about the new person with whom I shared my table. Perhaps, the staff and I had become too familiar. And so I ventured elsewhere.
The moment I stepped inside Bo’s Coffee, that two-story café across Miriam College, I knew that I was in for disappointment. The menu was decent enough, and in fact offered pastries and beverages similar to Starbucks’ for a lower price. Empty tables and available electricity sockets abound, too. These things, however, did not compensate for the dinginess and coldness of the place. The lights were too dim that I had trouble reading my book. The café looked weathered and the walls could use a fresh coat of paint. The floors were dirty and the air smelled musty, like antique furniture in need of dusting. When I went to the counter and the barista took my order like the waitress of a fast food restaurant would, I found myself missing the friendly staff in Starbucks, and terribly. On the tables were signs reminding the customer not to linger so as to give way to others. They did not have to put up those signs—that was already very obvious.
I never went to Bo’s Coffee again. Instead I walked over, just several meters from there, to Xocolat. True to its name, almost everything on its menu is designed around chocolate. I had the grilled chicken pasta with chocolate shavings for two hundred pesos and it was delicious. The place, I found, used to be a 1970s house and when it was turned into a café some years ago, much of its architectural features were retained. Such was Xocolat’s charm. It was a coffee shop, but it was most of all a home. Choosing whether to sit outside in the garden under the colorful lanterns or in the living room by the bookshelf was immensely difficult—every spot looked homey. I found, however, that this hominess was also its weakness. The café looked and felt so much like a home that I found myself just propping my feet up and not working. The baristas, too, were inordinately comfortable and tended to talk about their personal affairs loudly. I could not blame them. I stayed for the chocolate and the free wi-fi, but I barely got any work done.
It was difficult, finding a replacement for the Starbucks branch that I had grown so accustomed to, but still I plodded on. I went to The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf next, at the fairly new commercial complex, Regis Place. Everything in The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf was an invitation to linger. They served everything from breakfast bagels to pastries to pasta dishes and offered all sorts of coffee and fruit juices and teas. The music was mostly pleasant and not too loud so that I could still hear myself think. The washroom was spic and span. The booths were comfortable and functional—each was well lit, the chairs’ cushions were not too soft and just right, and the tables were spacious enough for all my things. Electric sockets were positioned strategically throughout the café. On the counter was a sign offering the customer laptop locks to ensure that their belongings were safe. Perhaps they anticipated that I was going to stay for the day.
And so I did. I went to the café early in the morning and first had the breakfast bagel with a cup of coffee. At twelve I had the tomato and herb pasta and a glass of pink guava juice. At two I had a slice of New York cheesecake and before I left for my class at four, I bought a revel bar to go. The trouble was not that they weren’t delicious for they were, and truly. I found, too, at the end of the day, that I had so much work done. The trouble was that, at the end of the day, I had spent so much, too. I had lavished a little less than a thousand pesos on food. When, on top of that, I also had to pay for wi-fi and parking, I doubted that I could afford to be the café’s habitué. On special occasions, perhaps.
I entered my final stop, Seattle’s Best-Kenny Rogers, and knew right away that I would linger. The beauty of the place was its sense of detachment—it let me alone. In its vastness, two spacious floors peppered with around forty tables, I found priceless solitude. I ordered my food, a choice between Seattle’s Best’s coffee and pastries and Kenny Rogers’ healthy and affordable roasted chicken meals, grabbed a seat by the bay window right beside the electrical socket and, in a moment, was in my very own microcosm. The place became oblivious to me, and me to it. The place did not mind that the colorful paintings that lined its walls were ignored—it knew that its purpose was to be unobtrusive. The waiters, too, left me alone because they knew that my desire was to be invisible. I read my book happily.
Every once in a while, I looked around. The man in the corner nook tapped away on his laptop blissfully, and was grinning wildly once in a while and laughing to himself like no one was looking. At another table, a group of teenage girls talked loudly of their secrets and of high school gossip, and no one seemed to hear. I scribbled away in my journal vigorously as I did when I was younger and had the bedroom all to myself. I felt truly alone, and for five hours I basked in this thought.
The problem with Seattle’s Best-Kenny Rogers, Katipunan was that the moment I stepped out of the doors and into the parking lot, I found that I had frittered away a total of one hundred and fifty pesos on parking fees. My first two hours of stay were free, but for every succeeding hour I was charged fifty. Sadly, the establishment was not as economical as it purported to be. I was happy and content all the same, for I knew that this problem may be easily remedied. The next time I go to Seattle’s Best-Kenny Rogers, I will go on foot. It will be worth the hike, for now at least.
In the same way that Hemingway keeps the name of the warm and clean and friendly café in the Place St.-Michel from his readers, when I do find that good café in Katipunan, that place that needs no compromise and where everything is just perfect, I will keep it to myself. Celebrated philosopher Jean Paul Sartre would understand that this is not simply a matter of being selfish. Decades after Hemingway’s Paris, Sartre and his lady friend, Simone de Beauvoir became habitués of the Café Flore, where for hours they wrote and talked about existentialism while nursing their cups of black coffee and cigarettes. When they became immensely famous, the café became famous, too, and soon it was swamped by throngs of adoring fans that the eccentric couple had to flee the café that had been their home for so long and never return. A café is good, most of all, because it is a secret.
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