From art hub to office: this is how coffee shops have evolved

Coffee has been a beverage that generates ideas: it brings people together around a table, encourages chatting and stimulates conversations. Artists, philosophers, writers and politicians have been the best customers of cafés that have marked a whole era in different capitals of the world, from Barcelona to Vienna, passing through Paris, London or Rome, where revolutions, artistic avant-gardes and much more have been born.

Coffee arrived in Europe through the Ottoman Empire, but it is not very clear which was the first coffee shop to open on European soil: there is talk of La Bottega del Caffè, in Venice, and of a coffee shop in Livorno opened by a merchant, both dating from the beginning of the XVII century. A little later, the Café Procope, in Paris, was the setting for the gatherings of Rousseau and Diderot, among others, and at the end of the same century, an Armenian merchant, Johanes Diodato raised the shutters of the first Viennese coffee shop, sumptuous, velvety and baroque, a style that would triumph everywhere, even in Japan, as Merry White tells in Coffee Life in Japan (University of California Press, 2021). In Spain, coffee shops became important towards the end of the 19th century, when places like Café Gijón, in Madrid, Café Iruña, in Pamplona, or Café Zurich, in Barcelona, became true institutions.

The cafeterias were spaces where underground movements of all kinds were cooked. The working classes went to the humbler ones to learn the news of the day, which were read aloud, as well as political opinions that mobilized workers for causes and demands of all kinds. Likewise, amidst the tobacco smoke and the aroma of coffee, other forms of painting, composing and writing appeared.

In Barcelona, Els Quatre Gats, still standing at number 8 Montsió Street, about 500 meters from Nomad Coffee Bar, was the cafeteria, brewery, cabaret and restaurant that hosted the proponents of Catalan modernism. Not only were food and drinks served there, but Els Quatre Gats had a very active cultural program, with exhibitions, talks and themed dinners, shadow shows and so on, which was responsible for stirring up the ideas of the intellectuals of the time, gathering them around a table and debated. The likes of Ramon Casas (who painted the famous oil mural of a tandem of himself and Pere Romeu, the owner of the establishment), Santiago Rusiñol, Joaquim Mir and Miquel Utrillo were regulars at Els Quatre Gats, and it was there that Picasso held his first exhibition.

This place was inspired by the already popular at the time Le Chat Noir in Paris, in the bohemian Montmartre district. It was a café, a cabaret and even a magazine where the most irreverent and also the most innovative texts of Paris at the end of the 19th century were published. Le Chat Noir was for six years the place to be of the Parisian night (changing location up to three times because such was its success that the space was soon too small) and in that short time it managed to make history forever thanks to the activities that took place and, undoubtedly, for its attendance: Verlaine, Debussy, Satie, Signac, Goudeau and Toulouse-Lautrec were regulars.

Coffee shops continue to be meeting points for lively conversations. However, another style of coffee drinking has taken hold in the Mediterranean: drinking it standing up or, as they say in Italy, at the bench, at the bar. The small volume of an espresso favors this quick consumption, where it is not even necessary to sit down to recharge one's batteries with a good concentrated dose of caffeine. But the tables have turned with the advent of teleworking. The high traffic of Mediterranean cafeterias slowed down to give way to their conversion into single-cell offices. The 21st century has put in check the conversations full of novelties and ideas to impose silence and the light of the screens, and in many cases it has had to be regulated to ensure the profitability of the business and so that we can all enjoy some time in front of our coffee at a table.