Gesture for spiritual people
Column The range of newspapers says more about a restaurant than its menu. Because people don't live on bread (or croissants) alone.
Column The range of newspapers says more about a restaurant than its menu. Every reasonably intelligent restaurateur knows that you can't not communicate - even if he thinks Paul Watzlawick is a Polish wrestler. And he should know that, in addition to the service culture and the hopefully non-existent fly in the ointment, newspapers are also part of the communication tools of good gastronomy.When, for example, the Herald Tribune is available in Zurich's Kaufleuten Bar, this is a statement of the internationality brought about by the banking district and at the same time a service for the sophisticated public. And the fact that the Bangkok Post can be found at Lily's Stomach Supply on Langstrasse communicates the cosmopolitan attitude of this upscale cookshop. Whether the Weltwoche, the Wochenzeitung, the Schweizer Familie or the Tierwelt is on display says a lot about the culture and zeitgeist affinity of a restaurant and therefore also about the clientele that frequents it. Newspapers reflect the identity of a bar, restaurant or cafeteria. As precarious as the financial situation in the
gastronomy today - a subscription to the Blick and the regional newspaper is enough for most restaurants.
But not in the Starbucks in Lucerne. There is only one free newspaper to read. It is called - oh wonder - 20 Minuten and is read in five. This is astonishing, especially as Starbucks defines its coffee houses as "third places", a term that goes back to the American sociologist Ray Oldenburg. Oldenburg uses the term to describe those third places (alongside home and work) where urban contemporaries spend their free time and seek the social closeness they miss in their single apartment.
In the USA, convivial places where you can read the newspaper in peace and quiet are something revolutionary, because the gastronomy there is programmed for high frequencies. In old Europe, however, and especially in Vienna, third places have been around for a long time. They are just called something else. Thomas Bernhard's "coffee house addiction" (self-diagnosis) was due to the fact that the Viennese coffee houses Bräunerhof, Eiles and Landtmann always had numerous international newspapers on display, including one of Helvetic origin. No wonder, the Austrian writer once wrote, that a man of the mind could not exist anywhere where there was no Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Newspapers connect the coffee drinker with current affairs. And signalize that they can linger without a waiter forcing them to order every quarter of an hour.
The founder of Starbucks,
Howard Schultz, once said that he doesn't sell coffee, but
15 minute break. Admittedly, a nice claim. But for it to be credible, the stores have to offer more than just the local edition of a free post. The question for guests is what to do with the remaining time once they have read the PR and agency messages. Stare into the empty coffee cup? Study the love lives of houseflies? Or shorten the break by ten minutes and leave this coffee house?
In view of the epidemic of cheap-is-cool nonsense, subscribing to quality newspapers signals that the host values his guests. This signal is all the more important as guests are being asked to pay 6.40 francs for a large caffe latte. But Starbucks probably considers its target group to be so intellectually underexposed that it should not be overburdened with Blick or the Neue Luzerner Zeitung - let alone an NZZ. We can only hope that this assessment does not correspond to reality.
Francis Müller also expects quality leaflets on caffeine brew in US coffee houses.
gastronomy today - a subscription to the Blick and the regional newspaper is enough for most restaurants.
But not in the Starbucks in Lucerne. There is only one free newspaper to read. It is called - oh wonder - 20 Minuten and is read in five. This is astonishing, especially as Starbucks defines its coffee houses as "third places", a term that goes back to the American sociologist Ray Oldenburg. Oldenburg uses the term to describe those third places (alongside home and work) where urban contemporaries spend their free time and seek the social closeness they miss in their single apartment.
In the USA, convivial places where you can read the newspaper in peace and quiet are something revolutionary, because the gastronomy there is programmed for high frequencies. In old Europe, however, and especially in Vienna, third places have been around for a long time. They are just called something else. Thomas Bernhard's "coffee house addiction" (self-diagnosis) was due to the fact that the Viennese coffee houses Bräunerhof, Eiles and Landtmann always had numerous international newspapers on display, including one of Helvetic origin. No wonder, the Austrian writer once wrote, that a man of the mind could not exist anywhere where there was no Neue Zürcher Zeitung. Newspapers connect the coffee drinker with current affairs. And signalize that they can linger without a waiter forcing them to order every quarter of an hour.
The founder of Starbucks,
Howard Schultz, once said that he doesn't sell coffee, but
15 minute break. Admittedly, a nice claim. But for it to be credible, the stores have to offer more than just the local edition of a free post. The question for guests is what to do with the remaining time once they have read the PR and agency messages. Stare into the empty coffee cup? Study the love lives of houseflies? Or shorten the break by ten minutes and leave this coffee house?
In view of the epidemic of cheap-is-cool nonsense, subscribing to quality newspapers signals that the host values his guests. This signal is all the more important as guests are being asked to pay 6.40 francs for a large caffe latte. But Starbucks probably considers its target group to be so intellectually underexposed that it should not be overburdened with Blick or the Neue Luzerner Zeitung - let alone an NZZ. We can only hope that this assessment does not correspond to reality.
Francis Müller also expects quality leaflets on caffeine brew in US coffee houses.
> Francis Müller is a freelance journalist and teaches at the Zurich University of Art and Design.
