From Vienna to Jerusalem and from Bagdad to Alexandria, there has existed, for at least five centuries, a cross-cultural group of people who are dedicated to passing as many hours as possible every day at one or more of their favorite cafes. And, whether it has been at Paris' postmodern Cafe Le Beaubourg or at the decrepit Friends' Meeting Place in Limassol, a significant number of artists have devoted their energies to recording or otherwise expressing such pleasures.

As Toulouse Lautrec and Edgar Degas delighted in sketching the social scenes of cafes, Lawrence Durrell and Ernest Hemmingway thrived on writing about them. John Lennon took pleasure in singing about the people who sit at cafes and Carl Sandburg and Sylvia Plath both devoted several poems to them. Photographers have also had a special interest in cafes. Cartier Bresson in France, Irving Penn in the United States and Alfred Eisenstaedt, while he was still living in Germany, all had a sizeable ouvre of photos of what many consider a unique cafe-related style-of-life.

At a surface reading the thirty-nine black and white photographs in the booklet "L'Orient des Cafes" published by the French Cultural Center seem a simple and charming examination of the similarities and differences between cafes of cities as diverse in character as Paris, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Damascus and Bagdad. Even though these hotographs can be thoroughly enjoyable at that level, there is, however, a second way in which to read these photographs that make up this exhibit - as an aide in defining what might be, despite cultural differences, the ideal cafe.

Anyone with an affinity for sitting at such establishments, has, consciously or otherwise, devoted a fair amount of time to such a definition. The task is not difficult. The ideal cafe is one in which you can pass the time because it combines just the right degrees of familiarity and impersonality. Even though you may be considered "a regular" in this cafe or that, no one will make demands on you as they might at home or at the workplace. The owner and waiters may know you by name, but would never dream of telling you that you have been drinking too much coffee or eating too many cakes. While they will confer with you on any invited subject from your sex life to your political or football favor- ites, nobody will ever criticize your choice of newspaper, the shoes you are wearing or your choice of deodorant.

Regardless of whether it is a well-known landmark such as Paris' Le Dome, one of the post-modern palaces that have begun to spring up in Rome or a run-down neighborhood cafe in out-of-the way towns such as Kinopiastes on Corfu Island, Piacenta in the north of Italy or Thionville on the border between France and Luxembourg, the ideal cafe is an inviting place where conversations and counter-conversations start up easily and are just as easily broken off. They are places where deals are made, bets are placed, lot- tery tickets are filled out, flirtations take place, and someone is always waiting to use the telephone.

They are places where one can settle down in the morning with an espresso or a cafe au lait, a croissant and a newspaper, there to stay as long as mood dictates. In the ideal cafe, no one will ever put pressure on you to order more or to hurry up so that someone else can take your table.

There will never be complete quiet in such places, but they will not be so noisy that one cannot focus on the book that one has brought along to read. The ground rules will be well enough defined that on any given day, the people who recognize you automatically know whether you are in the mood for company or wish to pass your time alone.

Ideal cafes are designed (probably by accident) so that from every niche it is possible to see who is entering or leaving. And, because it is as important to know what others are reading and drinking as it is to know with whom they have chosen to sit, such places allow an almost unrestricted line of sight of the other customers who have already taken their places. Such cafes also allow a fairly unrestricted view of the street. Seeing and being seen by the passing parade are critical to the enjoyment of a cafe.

Such cafes may serve only coffee and sandwiches or they may offer a far wider variety of drinks and comestibles. Although the coffee and schnapps should be really good, the quality of the food served is not all that important. Unlike restaurants, where we judge food critically, ambiance is the most critical factor in evaluating a cafe. The atmosphere should be such that one attains a sense of well-being merely by virtue of the fact that he or she is seated here.

Nor is the quality of service particularly important. Some of the best cafes boast at least one rude, slow or otherwise unsatisfactory waiter or waitress, but that person is an important part of the mood of the place and no-one would dream of giving them the boot.

Some of these cafes will be known for the intellectuals who frequent them and others, especially those that remain open late at night, will be renowned for the couples who sit in corners, necking soundlessly for hours on end, so oblivious to the world that they offend nobody at all. Other cafes will be famous for nothing more than the fact that the regular neighborhood clientele defend the place they consider their own with the kind of passion usually reserved for issues of great import.

Personally, I have always had a special admiration for those people, whether they are poets, novelists or journalists, who write in the noisy privacy of cafes. Settling down in the morning with a coffee, a croissant and a blank sheet of paper, and filling it as the cafe fills, these may be the most civilized of all human beings, the ring of the cash register serving for them as the ring at the end of a typewriter carriage, the shouted orders and the hum of voices providing background music for the arrangement of words on a page.

Selecting one's favorite cafe is much a very personal affair. It makes no difference however, whether one sits at an establishment that is world famous or one that has never been heard of outside of one's own neighborhood. Even architectural design and ambiance are a matter of individual taste. Some find themselves comfortable in the modern establishments that boast an abundance of glass and decoratively used structural steel building components. Others will find a place such as that described by Lawrence Durell, "with nothing fancy, but with the added a small garden, one where the sun is always more friendly and the charm of knowing that hidden behind a small kitchen one will find rain more tempered."

True devotees of the cafe life never restrict themselves to sitting at any single location. Like Don Juans and nymphomaniacs, they are always in search of someplace new. They may have their regular morning or evening ports-of-call but any excuse at all will do to have them sampling the coffee and ambiance in whatever new cafe catches their eye. Such people are not so much fickle as they are adventurous, at least in their desire to sample as much of life as possible.

© Daniel Rogov