The History of European Culture on the Coffee Table II. The Founding Period of Coffee House

Drank a cup of coffee for 350 years.

-you can read the newspaper and play pool.

In the early days of cafes, coffee shops, whether "Persian", "Egyptian", "Syrian" or "Turkish", were at first a paradise for the underclass of the West and wandering strangers.

But coffee alone can't attract many guests, so cafes often have services other than coffee, one is to provide newspaper reading, and the other is billiards.

You know, newspapers were very rare at that time, so people who came to the cafe could drink coffee for very little money and then read expensive newspapers. Many little-known cafes attracted a lot of guests in this way, as was the case with Kalman, the little-known "Scholar Cafe" in Vienna in 1719.

Billiards is another popular activity in European cafes. In fact, pool tables have already been set up in the earliest cafes, and in the era of "Hugoman Cafe", cafes have become a "place of wind and clouds" for billiards enthusiasts. In the Hugeman Cafe, there is a hall with three regular tables, and the coffee tables around the tables are always full of spectators. Outside the hall, the coffee garden overlooking the Danube and the city is full of celebrities, with well-dressed and well-mannered guests everywhere under the trees before the flowers. With this entertainment function, the cafe has become a place of entertainment for citizens, and an open social salon has begun to enter the center of life in Vienna conspicuously.

At the same time, the guests of the cafe began to change quietly, rebellious young people, freedom-loving scholars, businessmen, cultural figures, urban bourgeois class. All began to join the coffee drinking team.