Starbucks in Paris

Over the past week, concerns about the arrival of the Seattle java giant filtered their way through the media. The usual French suspects talked about Simone and Jean-Paul and their smart set spinning in their graves at the sight of the latest American cultural invasion. And just how do we know Starbucks won’t feed us American Frankenfood?

Yet the English-speaking denizens were even more exercised. “Is this the final fall of French civilization?” asked Theodore Dalrymple, a recent exile to France, only half in jest in The Times (of London)…

No self-respecting Hemingway wannabe would be caught dead near Starbucks. Tales of a misspent Parisian youth can’t be built around a 7,000-strong food chain from back home. The mythology of Paris — above all, it’s not America — is why we come…

The steady decline of French cafe culture predates Starbucks by about five decades. The number of cafes — which, for the record, serve more wine than coffee — topped out at about a half-million before World War II, before television and bigger apartments gave the French something else to do. Today the dirty secret is that the coffee often resembles “sock juice” — the old French slur against the American variety — and establishments are uniformly drab. At the Starbucks opening, co-founder Howard Schultz told me the old cafe just isn’t “as relevant” to French life as before. [WSJ]