Coffee room

“ If the accommodation consists only of a coffee-room, 30 to 40 feet long, with conveniences for serving light refreshments, and a small sleeping room adjoining, plain furniture and fittings might be provided for £100 or less. In connection with other arrangements, moveable stalls or barrows may be employed at small cost. These stalls may be supplied with provisions from the Coffee Publichouse, and wheeled to points where they are likely to attract the custom of working men at meal times, or on their way to work. ”

“ It was obviously impossible to pour out his own coffee and leave her the remainder. Should he ring for the waiter? No, the coffee should act as master of the ceremonies and bridge the gulf between them. Placing the coffee-pot and the milk-jug on the hearth, he waited, substituting a cigarette for his briar, lest its rich, juicy note might prove unmusical to feminine ears. For ten minutes he waited. Had the waiter merely made a mistake in bringing two cups instead of one? Possibly at this very moment she was enjoying her coffee in the dining-room. ”

“ The roof was of ithel beams with cross rafters of palm, thatched in with palm branches. The principal room is called the kahwah or coffee room; and in it there is a square hearth at the side or in the middle for coffee-making. There is no chimney, and the smoke escapes as it can; but this is not so uncomfortable as it sounds, for the wood burnt here burns with a beautiful bright flame, giving out a maximum of heat to a minimum of smoke. It is the ratha or ghada. [85] People sit round the hearth while coffee is being made, a solemn process occupying nearly half an hour. ”

“ We are a Private Room or Family business also; but Coffee-room principal. Me and the Directory and the Writing Materials and cetrer occupy a place to ourselves—a place fended of up a step or two at the end of the Coffee-room, in what I call the good old-fashioned style. The good old-fashioned style is, that whatever you want, down to a wafer, you must be olely and solely dependent on the Head Waiter for. You must put yourself a new-born Child into his hands. There is no other way in which a business untinged with Continental Vice can be conducted. ”

“ The only thing approaching coffee houses are the "coffee rooms" which are to be found in Christiania. These are small one-room affairs in which the plainer sorts of foods, such as porridge, may be purchased with the coffee. They are cheap, and are largely frequented by the poorer class of students, who use them as places in which to study while they drink their coffee.
In Russia and Switzerland, French and German methods obtain. Russia, however, drinks more tea than coffee, which by the masses is prepared in Turkish fashion, when obtainable. Usually, the coffee is only a cheap "substitute." ”

“ Since prohibition, the average citizen is drinking one hundred more cups of coffee a year than he did in the old days; and a good part of the increase is attributed to newly formed habits of drinking coffee between meals, at soda fountains, in tea and coffee shops, at hotels, and even in the homes. In other words, the increase is due to coffee drinking that directly takes the place of malt and spirituous liquors. There have come into being the hotel coffee room ”

“ Adjoining is the coffee room, where refreshments of a simple kind are always to be had. There is a reading room for the women and one for the men; large, lofty, airy, well lighted, beautiful rooms, with every comfort of tables and chairs and desks, for writing and reading. ”

“ In some parts of London women leaving the factory at midday may often be seen taking a cold and unsatisfying meal in the open air—on a doorstep or in a corner, anywhere—exposed to the inclemency of the weather. Wherever suitable coffee-room accommodation has been provided for them, working women have gladly availed themselves of it. One of the houses of the People's Café Company in High Street, Whitechapel, has many customers of this class. ”

“ Cousin Clare cheered them up with the thoughts of the coffee ordered for ten o'clock, and of berths when they got on board the steamer.
"We might be far worse off," she assured them. "For at least we have a comfortable hotel to rest in. I remember once having to spend most of the night in a waiting-room at the station at Marseilles. Put your feet up on the sofa, Lilias! Carmel, child, if you'd shut your eyes, I believe you'd go to sleep. I vote we all try to doze for an hour, until our coffee comes to wake us up." ”

“ The reading-room, with penny cups of coffee, holds out its modest charms, and does much good, but still leaves the masses as it finds them. Something else is wanted, but it is difficult to say what it should be. ”

“ If a cup of the very best coffee, prepared in the highest perfection and boiling hot, be placed on a table in the middle of a room and suffered to cool, it will, in cooling, fill the room with its fragrance: but becoming cold, it will lose much of its flavor. Being again heated, its taste and flavor will be still further impaired, and heated a third time, it will be found vapid and nauseous. The aroma diffused through the room proved that the coffee has been deprived of its most volatile parts, and hence of its agreeableness and virtue. ”

“ This is fairly effective, but in the impure air of London or of a manufacturing town, distemper work will need renewal annually. In the country it may stand two years or more. The appearance of a coffee-room is much improved by a few good prints on the walls, and pictures of any kind are seen to much better advantage upon a wall coloured as described than against a paper with coloured designs. Whether painting or papering be decided upon, the arsenical greens which are injurious to health should be avoided. Where a highly decorative effect is desired mirrors may also be introduced. ”

“ In case the first floor is not required for coffee-room purposes, it may be let to a working man's club, or other societies, for meetings, etc., or it may be utilised for letting lodgings and fitted with divisions or 'cubicles,' each of which forms a small bedroom suitable for a single man; any other rooms that can be spared in the upper part of the house being fitted in the same manner. The cost of dividing rooms in this manner, including partitions and plain furnishing with iron bedsteads 6 feet by 3 feet, will be from £5 to £5. ”

“ Fashions in nomenclature linger long, and even now in old-established inns and hotels, the Coffee-room still exists, but has paradoxically come to mean a public combined dining- and [Pg 276] sitting-room for private guests, in contradistinction from the Commercial-room, to which commercial travellers resort, at a recognised lower tariff. ”

“ The arrangement of a Turkish coffee-house is of the simplest. The essential is that the place should provide the beverage for which it exists and room for enjoying the same. A sketch of a coffee-shop may often be seen on the street, in a scrap of shade or sunshine according to the season, where a stool or two invite the passer-by to a moment of contemplation. Larger establishments, though they are rarely very large, are most often installed in a room longer than it is wide, having as many windows as possible at the street end and what we would call the bar at the other. ”

“ A French coffee-house is a place well worth visiting by a stranger, more especially a [Pg 113] Yankee stranger. I will therefore detain you a little longer from the brilliant congregation of beauty and gallantry in the assembly room, and introduce you for a moment into this café and to its inmates. As the coffee houses here do not differ materially from each other except in size and richness of decoration, though some of them certainly are more fashionable resorts than others, the description of one of them will enable you perhaps to form some idea of other similar establishments in this city. ”

“ There will be coffee-pots of the sizes needed, a jar of freshly ground coffee, and a kettle the right size for the gas stove, so as to have freshly boiled water whenever it is needed. A waitress who is disposed to make the most of these conveniences can save both herself and others great annoyance.
If coffee is made only in the kitchen, then the side-table will have the proper appliances for keeping coffee and milk at the required temperature. A lamp under a coffee urn soon destroys the flavor of fine coffee, but a lamp under a hot-water tray will do no harm. ”

“ Much I marvelled at the sagacity evinced by waiters and chamber-maids in proportioning the accommodation to the guest. How could inn-servants and ship-stewardesses everywhere tell at a glance that I, for instance, was an individual of no social significance, and little burdened by cash? They did know it evidently: I saw quite well that they all, in a moment’s calculation, estimated me at about the same fractional value. The fact seemed to me curious and pregnant: I would not disguise from myself what it indicated, yet managed to keep up my spirits pretty well under its pressure.
Having at last landed in a great hall, full of skylight glare, I made my way somehow to what proved to be the coffee-room. ”

“ In one room is a "merry-go-round." The chairs are placed in a circle and a graphaphone in the center plays popular tunes. At 10 o'clock the doors to the dining room are opened. The table cloth is spread on the floor, surrounded by cushions. In one corner of the room are the baskets containing the supper of sandwiches, olives, pickles, baked beans, cake, pie and other picnic favorites. The girls take the viands from the baskets and arrange them on the floor, while the men serve coffee from a coffee boiler on a small table. ”

“ We are a bed business, and a coffee-room business. We are not a general dining business, nor do we wish it. In consequence, when diners drop in, we know what to give ’em as will keep ’em away another time. ”

“ If after-dinner coffee is made on the table, it is convenient to set out all the articles needed for this on a tray on the sideboard. Room must be kept on the serving table for the vegetable dishes which are usually left there during the course to which they belong. ”

“ Reynolds; the Percy, in Oxford Street, the inspiration for the Percy Anecdotes; the Piazza, in Covent Garden, where Macklin fitted up a large coffee room, or theater, for oratory, and Fielding and Foote poked fun at him; the Rainbow, in Fleet Street, the second coffee house opened in London, having its token money; the Smyrna, in Pall Mall, a "place to talk politics," and frequented by Prior and Swift; Tom King's, one of the old night houses of Covent Garden Market, "well known to all gentlemen to whom beds are unknown" ”

“ Distribution of roasted coffees outside Chicago and Kansas City is accomplished [Pg 525] through the medium of more than one hundred stock depots in as many different cities of the United States.
To operate the world's greatest coffee business is no small undertaking; and when this is coupled with an important sugar-refining business and a waterfront warehouse-and-terminal business, plenty of room is needed. So we find the plant along the Brooklyn waterfront occupying an area of a dozen city blocks. ”

“ He meditated resentfully on the physical texture of life. Had it always been like this? Had food always tasted like this? He looked round the canteen. A low-ceilinged, crowded room, its walls grimy from the contact of innumerable bodies; battered metal tables and chairs, placed so close together that you sat with elbows touching; bent spoons, dented trays, coarse white mugs; all surfaces greasy, grime in every crack; and a sourish, composite smell of bad gin and bad coffee and metallic stew and dirty clothes. ”

“ Near the coffee-houses are one or two cataracts several feet high, and the perpetual sound of their fall, and the coolness they spread around, are exquisite luxuries—in the heat of day, or in the dimness of evening. There are two or three Cafés constructed somewhat differently from those just described: a low gallery divides the platform from the tide; fountains play on the floor, which is furnished with very plain sofas and cushions; and music and dancing always abound, of the most unrefined description. ”

“ It was stupid custom which insisted that any and every transaction should be carried out at a tavern, where continual sipping made men unfit for business. Coffee, on the contrary, was a "wakeful" drink. And the company of the coffee-house enabled its frequenter to follow the proper study of man, mankind. The triumphant conclusion was that a well-regulated coffee-house was "the sanctuary of health, the nursery of temperance, the delight of frugality, an academy of civility, and free-school of ingenuity." ”

“ Its familiar aspect may attract tipplers who may be not indisposed to turn over a new leaf provided the break in their habits and associations be not too violent. At the same time, it is to be borne in mind that more table accommodation is required in a Coffee Publichouse than in a beerhouse, or gin palace. The larger the ground floor, therefore, other things being equal, the more suitable the premises. ”

“ Her special business is to make everybody happy; to crack the great white sugar-loaf into bits with a pair of pincers—no machine-made dominoes for Lemois—and to turn the coffee-roaster—an old-fashioned, [13] sheet-iron drum swinging above a brazier of hot coals—and to cool its contents by tossing them in a pan—much as an Egyptian girl winnows wheat. It is a pity you never tasted her coffee, served in the garden—old Leà on the run with it boiling-hot to your table. ”

“ She had tucked up the silken skirt of her gown and was deftly measuring out coffee—after the swift, preliminary shaking of the fire with which every woman takes possession of a kitchen—pouring the water into the coffee-pot from the steaming kettle, and then vibrating between the kitchen closet and the butler’s pantry with the quick, capable movements of one who knows her ground thoroughly. ”