I have never been seen an automatic coffee making machine for single-serve restaurant use but they seem to be everywhere in Paris. Even some nice looking coffeehouse or restaurants here with perfect service do not have their staff make coffee except to have a machine produce it. I always wondered what engineering difficulties there might be in having a expensive restaurant machine produce perfect espresso, because it does seem to be the kind of work which could be automated. Whatever those machine problems are have not been resolved here, because the coffee I am finding is uniformly bad. I am not sure whether to blame the machines or the coffee marketers, but it all tastes flat and thin here.
These machines seem to have a button on them for every kind of coffee order, and when requested, will produce coffee for any drink if provided a cup under a spout before pressing the respective button. The people who make the coffee are very sweet. Actually everyone here is very sweet, but restaurant staff is especially friendly, and they talk kindly, and are all very cute people. I think they must not know they are giving people bad coffee.
I was in trouble this morning when I went to breakfast at the hostel where I am staying. I speak no French except to say please, thanks, excuse me, and coffee, but I had not anticipated trouble because I did not expect to do anything totally unfamiliar. I joined the buffet and a woman at the entrance to the food queue said some things, including “cafe” which means coffee. I was very happy to request coffee so I did, but she seemed to not understand, and as I asked for cafe again she gave me a large bowl of coffee. I was confused because I wanted coffee, and in the coffeehouses around they have been giving me espressos that seemed like poor drip coffee in a small cup or Americanos which seemed the same in a slightly larger cup which still left me wanting for volume even though it was bad coffee. Now I had plenty of coffee but I had never before encountered a large bowl of coffee so I did not know how to consume it.
The French have a reputation for good manners and I thought that I did not want to appear as a rude American. There were other people in the cafeteria, and hostels are friendly places, but I really wanted to just have coffee and leave rather than try to make friends. I saw other food unfamiliar to me, including little round hard breads and some kind of yellow bread, along with what I thought might have been jam for bread, so I took these on my tray and went back to my table and sat alone. I decided to watch what other people did with their bowls of coffee.
As I walked back to my table I spied on the food other others, and noticed that while they were still eating, their bowls were typically empty, so I imagined that they had drunk their bowl of coffee first. I wondered how to drink it because obviously it was a bowl and had no handle, so it would not be obvious how to drink it. They gave me a big spoon, like a tablespoon, and a little spoon, like a spoon only for stirring coffee. Neither of these are standard tablewear in the United States and I did not know what to do with either. If I had a cup of coffee I might stir it with that coffeespoon if I put something in it. I think the French expect people to put milk and sugar in coffee, but I like mine black so I had this extra spoon. It was so little that even if I were putting things in this bowl of coffee it seemed silly to stir the big bowl with the little spoon, so I had this big spoon. I prefer not to have such a big spoon in my mouth, but I imagined that it could be a soup spoon, and maybe they eat morning coffee like a breakfast soup in Paris. I tried having my coffee soup which was poured from a machine by eating it with the big spoon but as I looked around no one else was doing this and again, since French invented Western table manners I did not want to commit the faux pas of eating coffee with the wrong spoon so I put it down.
Suddenly one of the workers who was cleaning tables came up to me and seemed to be scolding me, and I was worried because I could not understand any of her French. Someone else came up to me to translate that I should not be eating from my tray. I know that trays are not for proper settings, but as this was a youth hostel and we brought our own food to our own tables on trays, I did not think it would be so unexpected to eat one’s food on the tray on which it was served, especially since there were no small plates available onto which to put the breads I had taken earlier and to remove the tray would mean putting them directly onto the table. This was exactly what this person wanted, and she motioned that I should remove my food from the tray so as to serve myself breakfast directly from the table itself. After removing the tray it went back to the collection for use by others without washing it, so I gathered that part of the problem of my using the tray for my food was that if I soiled it then there was no immediate plan to rewash it, and therefore I should eat from the table instead as that would be cleaned.
By this time I have not seen anyone interact with their bowl at all, so I wanted to leave it for a bit more, and examine my food and eat some. I opened my jam container after looking at where it said in French “no beef and no pork”, which I took to mean that it was vegetarian gelatin. Instead it was full of meat, perhaps chicken I imagined. On closer inspection the container said that it was pate. I put that aside as I really wanted a vegetarian breakfast. I checked my bread, which seemed to be just bread, and I checked my yellow bread, which now seemed to be cake. I was not eager for sweets and do not know how pate is used, but I had not imagined pate served either with sweets or coffee. Perhaps it is; it is not familiar to me.
At this point I thought of picking up my coffee bowl and just drinking it because I did want the coffee, but actually, I just wanted to leave and go on with my day. I looked around me and dirty dishes and empty coffee bowls were all around me on other tables. In many hostels the custom is to clean after one’s self, but here they already forced me to relinquish my tray, so it would not be easy for me to collect the remnants of my meal and return them to any collection point. Furthermore, I saw no collection point. I stood and put on my coat to walk away but then someone stopped me and said that I must clean my table, and directed me to a wall with a hole in it. The hole was no large but then I saw a coffee bowl in it, so I collected my breakfast and disposed of it in that hole. The hole must be cleaned continually because it looked too small to keep more than four coffeebowls, and I might have expected a bus tub system to be used in case of messes and to keep dishes for everyone as a lot of food was out and the room was large enough to cater to a lot of people.
I will think more about what to do with a bowl of coffee and try again.