Beans!

In other posts, I’ve discussed the Parisian Coffee Paradox: in a city filled with lovely cafés, it is hard to find a great cup of coffee. More specifically, you can find good coffee, but it’s nothing like the excellent espressos of Italy. Basically, the city seems to lack coffee weenies. People get excited about cafés, but not café—it’s hard to get anyone worked up about beans or blends. Or at least that’s what I thought until I wandered into the Brulerie des Ternes on rue des Petits Champs. Due to my diminished olfactory state, I can’t tell you about the delicious aromas filling the tiny boutique, but I’ll be they are fab. I can tell you that the place seemed to be crawling with something I’ve never seen before: French coffee weenies. They were all hovering around the bar, drinking tiny cups of darkest brown coffee nectar and buying bean blends with Italian sounding names. One guy was inquiring after fill-it-yourself coffee pods, which according to the woman behind the bar, are so easy to use a child could do it. “You don’t know my daughter,” he responded.

There is nothing but coffee and sugar in this store, no cookies, no biscuits, no fluorescent-colored bottled water. The coffee is French roasted, as in locally roasted in France, somewhere nearby I’ll bet, and it is really really good. I got a “carte de fidelité,” which means if I drink enough coffee there I’ll get a free bag of beans ground to my specifications, but in true French style, there is no address or website on the card. But I believe that it was 30 rue des Petits Champs, and there are other outlets where you may or may not be able to drink a cup at 10 rue Poncelet, 28 rue de la Annonciation, and one more on the bottom of rue Moufftard.