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Registered: 02-25-07
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Coffee: While the rest of the UK is famous for tea, Londoners love their coffee too. As a result, there are several excellent local places to imbibe the dark liquid, so don’t touch Starbucks. Not surprisingly, all of my recommendations are in Soho, within two streets of each other. That’s because for much of the 20th century, the French and Italian artistic communities hung out there among the prostitutes, dancers and actors who worked there. Talk about fun…
• Caffé Nero: The original Soho location is one of the best places in London, and they have managed to create a chain without losing the sense of making good coffee. The coffee is (of course) Italian in style, but there is just something so elegant in the way it tastes. And the patisserie is really first class – as good as anything you’ll find elsewhere.
• Costa Coffee: The dominant chain and working hard to keep it that way. You can get great coffee from any of their thousands of locations. They are as much a part of the London streetscape as red telephone boxes.
• Patisserie Valerie: The original location is in Old Compton Street, along from the original Caffé Nero. Madame Valerie was a French lady who was both vast in stature and in fame. She hung out and gambled with the 1920s Bohemian set, and she made delicious pastries. The surroundings are not elegant – they are very Spartan and reminiscent of post-war Britain, but you aren’t there for the surroundings. You are there to fill your face with the most wonderful cakes and pastries imaginable. The chain is also good, but the branches are in more salubrious surroundings (such as Marylebone and Cromwell Road) and are more elegant.
• Maison Bertaux: Like Patisserie Valerie, but if anything, the cakes are even better while the surroundings are ever more squalid. Worth it because you too can, for the time it takes you to get your laughing gear around a chocolate éclair, be a starving artist too.
• Bar Italia: The original 1950s Italian coffee bar. While the rest of Soho has transitioned to the smart epicenter of swinging London, Bar Italia, with it’s 24-hour football, way-too-bright fluorescent light and ubiquitous Vespas parked outside, stays resolutely the same. I include it here out of respect more than anything else. I’ve always preferred the establishments over the road.
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