The Coffee House Quotes

“Identifying coffee-houses as the pre-eminent location of ‘speaking evil’ of the government,”
― Markman Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History

“Arriving in the coffee-house, customers were expected to take the next available seat, placing themselves next to whoever else has come before them. No seat could be reserved, no man might refuse your company. This seating policy impresses on all customers that in the coffee-house all are equal.”
― Markman Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History

“Coffee-house conversations, Pepys had discovered, presented a fascinating panoply of philosophical puzzles. The attraction of the place was never simply the coffee, which Pepys did not seem to like much, but rather the potential he found there for social intercourse and companionship with one’s fellows – what his age called ‘sociality’ or ‘sodality’, the quality of fellowship, brotherhood and company.”
― Markman Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History

“As he noted in his pocketbook, Although they are destitute of Taverns, yet have they Coffa-houses, which something resemble them. There sit they chatting most of the day; and sippe of a drinke called Coffa (of the berry that it is made of) in little China dishes, as hot as they can suffer it: blacke as soote, and tasting not much unlike it.”
― Markman Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History

“Yet for most of human history, coffee was unknown outside a small region of the Ethiopian highlands. Coffee itself has been consumed in Europe only in the last four centuries. There is no coffee in the Torah, or the Bible, or the Koran. There is no coffee in Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes. After initially being recognised, in the late sixteenth century, by a few sharp-eyed travellers in the Ottoman Empire, coffee gained its first foothold in Europe among curious scientists and merchants. The first coffee-house in Christendom finally opened in London in the early 1650s, a city gripped by revolutionary fervour. In this sense, coffee’s eruption into daily life seems to coincide with the modern historical period.”
― Markman Ellis, The Coffee-House: A Cultural History