T A B L E_T A L K Where are the best places to go boating? Discuss the joys of aquatic recreation in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y The heart of a tourist hustler By Lisa Dreier Lonely in India, she befriended the local playboy. Who could know what would happen next? (09/18/98) In shackles with the Freedom Bag By Carol Lloyd The perfect luggage -- for a pygmy (09/17/98) Where am I gonna go today? By Aaron Paulson Finding a job overseas through the Internet (09/16/98) No man is a garden By Simon Firth Treasures of the English gardener's art -- and the spirit at its heart (09/15/98) Chili con carne, anyone? By Vijai Maheshwari In Moscow, buyers are snapping up whatever's on the shelves (09/14/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives Wanderlust's Official Travel Book Partner		P A R I S ' S_cafe_R E N A I S S A N C E _________________From nouveau sleek to retro chic, there's _____a lively new scene in the City of Caffeine. __________BY DAVID DOWNIE - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - At about 6 o'clock every morning but Sunday, Madame Renée or her husband, José, drag the banged-up tables and chairs out of their cafe and set them up on the cobbled terrasse under my bedroom window. At anywhere from 11 p.m. to 2 a.m. they muscle them back in again. Renée has been doing this all her life: Her mother ran the cafe before her and her daughter will doubtless continue the tradition. My wife and I have lived above Renée's for 12 years or about 7,500 chair-and-table draggings. We don't feel particularly privileged. There are roughly 10,000 cafes in the City of Caffeine. Up and down the scarred asphalt sidewalks and across the quaint cobbled squares, the patrons do the same dawn and midnight chair dance. Enough, you might say, to make us hate Renée, José and Paris cafes in general? Not a bit of it. Well, maybe once in a while we'd love to pour boiling oil out the window. But what would Paris be sans cafes? They're the stomach, lungs, liver, bad conscience and -- oh yes -- soul of the city. You buy tobacco in some, gamble in others, philosophize, write or surf in yet others, and drink and eat in all -- sometimes well. Romance buds, hatred flares, revelation dawns, violence erupts, fortune smiles upon lucky winners, smoke gets in everyone's eyes. If nothing else, cafes animate the city -- that is, they keep it awake with noise and stimulants. They've been around for centuries (Le Procope, now a travesty, was founded by a Sicilian in 1686). And though there are fewer of them today than, say, 20 years ago, they will be here forever. Admittedly, the coffee itself is often pretty bad. "For the coffee? Good heavens, no, I don't go to a cafe for that. Coffee is simply about the cheapest thing you can order while occupying a table for an hour or so ..." It was mid-morning. We were in the Café Jade on the Rue de Buci in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood. I always meet my English friend -- a Paris denizen for the last 35 years -- in cafes. That's where she does her entertaining, holds meetings, reviews scripts, edits manuscripts. She took a hummingbird sip at the black tar in her espresso cup and nodded at the goings-on: waiters whirling among the mushroom-shaped tables, a mixed clientele of aging regulars from the 'hood, loners, mavericks, tourists, Sorbonne students, a businessman seated outside on the shaded terrasse, shouting into his cellular telephone. The open market was in full swing around the corner so the street swam with colors, movement, voices. Our table was an eddy: In safety we snapped up snatches of foreign and French conversation, feasted on the sight of passersby, drank in the kitchen smells of simmering food. "That's why one comes, isn't it?" asked my friend. "For this -- the life, the human contact." Once the haunt of Paris inevitables like Jean-Paul Sartre, Picasso, Hemingway, et al, Saint-Germain-des-Prés may have lost most of its intellos (intellectuals), artists and retenues of sycophants. But its dozens of cafes live on very much as before -- with the exception of the famous Deux Magots and the Café de Flore, which have become exquisite tourist traps. My friend and I hadn't actually meant to meet at the Café Jade, now a pleasant enough wannabe-trendy retro spot. Until a few months ago, it had been known as the Café Dauphin. We were unaware of the changeover. Gone are the Dauphin's booths with their slippery, pumpkin-colored moleskin seats. Now there are faux-antique wooden tables and hard-bottomed chairs. A salmon- colored neon tube curls across the ceiling. The awning is a matching salmon pink. It's odd to feel nostalgic about the cruddy old Dauphin and its hideous 1970s decor, lousy food and worse coffee. But as my friend pointed out, the decor, food and coffee are marginal considerations. It's the feel of the place that counts, the atmosphere, the relationship between waiter and client, waiter and patron, patron and client, client and client. This web is spun over months, years, decades. More than anyone perhaps, photographer Robert Doisneau captured this microcosm of Frenchness in his grainy black-and-white shots: images that have become icons and clichés, like berets, baguettes, pétanque bowlers, ripe camemberts. Camembert or not, even today most Paris cafes are still family-owned or -managed and many, like Madame Renée's, are handed down through the generations, webs and all. While they have long been taken for granted, recently these supremely democratic social institutions have become the focus of renewed attention and appreciation. Restaurant critics have started reviewing them alongside their siblings, the bistros and brasseries. And for the last five years or so, a festival celebrating them has been held in late September: The Bistrots-en-Fête, as it is known, has quickly evolved into a popular modern Bacchanal featuring dancing, feasting and drinking, often to excess. The top end of the fashion/lifestyle industry has begun to pay attention too, wedding the cafe revival to Food-in-Shop, that nifty invention pioneered in London and New York. Now it's très chic to buy CDs and hang out at the Virgin Megastore cafe; drop megabucks at Emporio Armani and be surrounded by monied X-rays as you lap up a foamy cappuccino; and toy with the accessories at Lanvin before lunching in the modish Caffé Bleu. An aberration of another kind is Ah! ça ira!, a self-service, patriotic, red-white-and-blue (yes, those are the colors of the French flag, too) cafe that opened this June. It's cold, charmless, has no waiters, no regulars and caters primarily to cheapo tourists, though many locals, fed up with high cafe prices, are being converted. The coffee is cheap, the beer is cheap and the decor is strictly high turnover, but you can get a decent brownie and a cuppa something hot for less than $3 (the place is not officially a cafe, so it pays only 5.6 percent Value Added Tax (VAT), not 21.6 percent like other cafes, and there's no 15 percent service charge, either). The name refers to the cafe's location at Place de la Bastille, stormed by patriots in 1789. One of their Revolutionary chants included that catchy refrain, Ah! ça ira! -- yeah, we can do it, it'll all work out! Could it be the chant of a new Tax Revolt? Hmmmm .... The nearby Café des Phares, the first and still most popular philosophy cafe in town, provides a counterbalance, with a volunteer army of bespectacled intellos ready if necessary to storm across the square and tongue-lash the faux-Revolutionary "ça ira" types with quotes from tomes by Pascal, Descartes, Camus, Sartre, Deleuze, Foucault. That's about as political as cafes get in these post-Berlin Wall days. N E X T+P A G E | Why can't I get good French roast in Paris?