Bamboo: Essays and Criticism

The British Caff

There’s a fine, near-classic example behind King’s Cross Station, and there’s a particularly austere — brutally austere — one in Hounslow. If you’re looking for down and out seedy there’s a beauty on the Old Kent Road, guaranteed to set the soul in a slow slide of despair. For pure grease, however, the air peppery and astringent with fat fumes, there’s one I frequent in Notting Hill and on the Gray’s Inn Road there’s a monster — London’s version of La Coupole, as it were — with a venerable history of some few decades.

I’m talking, of course, about that great, possibly obsolescent British institution — the Caff. “Cafe” seems far too classy an appellation, too foreign. “Greasy spoon” somehow recalls the 1930s American Depression to me, or a truckers’ halt — the semantics is not quite right. We say, don’t we, “I’m off down to the caff,” or “See you in the caff in half an hour” and the word seems just about perfect — bluntly anglicized, demotic, accentless, unpretentious, apt. Whether you’re in Aberdeen or Guildford, Norwich or Durham, you know exactly, precisely what you’re going to get — in terms of ambience and nourishment — when you call a place a “caff.”

Forget pubs, the British caff is our true and enduring culinary landmark. You can find a flawless replica pub in Prague or Barcelona, these days. Pubs have gone up-market, are franchised, themed. The caff resists this gentrification doggedly and triumphantly. They exist nowhere else, indeed no other country in the world would want them. They remain irreducibly ours. Ignored, despised, avoided, unrecorded, unclassified, guide-free, the caff clings on in all corners of our cities and towns, an enduring testimonial to our indifference to comfort, our bad taste, our appalling eating habits and our complete lack of savoir-vivre.

When I was researching my latest novel, Armadillo, which is set entirely in London, my travels around the city took me to many of these bleak estaminets, these gloomy watering holes, and I spent long hours in them, observing the traffic of customers, gingerly eating and drinking, making notes. I went into them initially in a spirit of anthropological curiosity, but the more time I spent, caff-dwelling, the more a form of creeping affection for them grew in me. Feelings of hygienic distaste, of mild shame, gave way to sneaking admiration, of almost pride. Who else could have evolved such a dauntingly rebarbative institution? What did it say about us as a people, a nation? Surely, I reasoned, here was some form of pure objective correlative for us, the British, one untouched by hand of marketing man, design team, tourist board or whatever. Here lay — in gustatory terms at least — a small quintessence of our national psyche.

This increasing familiarity with and affection for the caff grew into a near-obsession. I started seeking out more and more examples, subspecies and hybrid types, started pestering my friends for their local variations. I even gave my central character in the novel — who also spent a lot of time caff-bound — a similar fixation. He started — let’s be honest, I started — to evolve a crude taxonomy, writing prime exemplars down in a notebook under the rubric “Great British Caffs.” Like some latter-day Linnaeus, my protagonist set about distinguishing the true from the bogus, steadily evolving criteria for a more exact classification, beginning to understand what fitted the bill — what was an echt-caff, an über-caff — and what fell short of the archetype.

Months of experience, of diligent patronage, have led me to some basic definition of the key constituents. I think I can now describe what I would term the exemplary British caff — the Platonic Ideal — with some accuracy.

First of all the question of location — irrelevant. Some of the most authentic caffs thrive in the trendiest purlieus, indifferent to the modish frenzy around them, but, in truth, the real aficionado prefers mean streets. Litter, graffiti, urban decay, gasometers, a palpable sense of fear — a rubbish-clogged canal or railway marshalling yards nearby add a certain je ne sais quoi. That the caff flourishes in such an inhospitable domain is part of its essential appeal.

Second: size. The smaller the better. One room contains all — food and drink preparation, counter, tables and chairs together in the same rectangle. There is an argument to be made for a rear area — dingier, darker, redolent of the lavatory — but one room remains a key criterion.

Third: decor. The essential factor here is absence of decor. Charm lies in charmlessness. Lino, Formica, plastic cladding, melamine, stainless steel, aluminium, glass, styrofoam tiles, cork (at a pinch) — these are the materials out of which the Platonic caff is constructed. The only exception to this austerity is kitsch. Extreme kitsch is self-justifying — bad murals, clashing paint schemes, bric-a-brac and the rest. There is one caff I know whose decor revolves around a Union Jack theme (the owners are very patriotic). The flag motif overwhelms, is overabundantly in your face — no one in their right mind would want to see so many Union Jacks in one small room — which is why it works. We will allow also the odd calendar, a poster or two, a stray bit of never-to-be-removed Christmas bunting, an occasional pot of struggling moribund greenery — spider plants or parched geraniums, preferably. Otherwise an almost total Bauhausian form-and-function, abhorrence-of-the-decorative ethos should prevail.

Fourth: food. Again, the idea of a few central ingredients endlessly re-combined is the dominant concept. Eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, chips, bread, mushrooms, peas, black pudding, gammon, tomato sauce, brown sauce, vinegar and so on. Quality is irrelevant. Indeed, the true connoisseur wants bad food — high gristle quotient in the sausage, nothing but margarine, over-generous salting everywhere, maximum water content in any cooked veg — but in fact it is fine if the food is tasty: no problem. The crucial factor, nutritionally, is the unhealthiness package. Baked beans are the only fibre admissible; a high saturated-fat content is a sine qua non, massive cholesterol intake is vital. Soft white sliced bread, everything pan- or deep-fried rather than grilled, a mix of carbohydrates that would defeat the training programme of an olympic athlete — bread and fried bread and chips and a pie, say, to accompany bacon and sausage and black pudding. The list is not long and any attempt to add something exotic (curried baked beans just pass muster) excludes the place from true caff classification. Any spaghetti, lasagne, any fish, chops, etc. — any salad, for heaven’s sake — move it into the sphere of pseudo-restaurant. Sandwiches are allowed but again must be strictly controlled — we want no hint of Marks & Sparks or Pret à Manger, no sesame seed baps or wholemeal baguettes. The bread is white — period — the whiter and more taste-free the better. The fillings are limited — ham, cheese, roast beef (just), chicken or turkey roll (nothing off the bone) and tomatoes and cucumbers which must be sliced transparently thin. One caff I know offers — year round — only egg, tomato, ham and cheese. On no occasion must the filling even approach the thickness of the bread slice. Tuna is allowed as long as it is mashed with vinegar to achieve a near-fluid state. Egg can be rendered similarly deliquescent with the addition of salad cream — never mayonnaise.

Drink. Firm rules apply here. Tea or coffee, milk — a glass of milk, an almost vanished drink these days, is regularly consumed in caffs — tins of cheap gassy colas (unrefrigerated) and that’s it. You might get a carton of juice and no caff is ever licensed to sell alcohol. Refinements on the hot drink agenda include tea being served from the pot (a real bonus) and, amazingly, there are some caffs still using Camp Coffee (the liquid mix, for those with long memories) but normally the coffee must be instant and unbranded. As soon as there is a Cona machine or a Gaggia then we are in espresso bar territory and caffdom is lost, irretrievably.

These are, I think, the essential defining factors of the Platonic caff. There are variations and some enthusiasts may argue for alternative necessities. But, as any regular caff-goer realizes, there are other more elusive, harder to define qualities that make the places and the experience of being in them so distinct and memorable. Think of pre-eminent factors such as condensation and cigarette smoke. To have a plate-glass window that one can see through seems entirely wrong (indeed, ideally one wants condensation and a diamond mesh security grille). Also, a non-smoking caff seems oxymoronic. A purist would insist on roll-up cigarettes only. A badly tuned transistor radio (Radio 1, Capital Gold) also adds to the ambience as, of course, do the patron and his staff and their various attitude problems (whether raucous or sullen, suicidally depressed or irredeemably sloppy). All these elements contribute immeasurably to the aggregate of features that makes the places unique.

But there is something higher, more intellectual and philosophical that makes caff-life so addictive in its special way. I think it is because caffs are not, fundamentally, social places. They tend to favour the solitary or the untalkative; indeed, they have to be uncrowded in order to function best. You sit there in a corner alone with two or three others. The old geezer with his tightly folded tabloid; the seventeen-year-old mother-of-two smoking herself to death; the tattooed youth with his face full of iron. You don’t want to share a table, you don’t want to talk, you’re not (unless you happen to be a novelist) even curious about these strange folk and they in turn are deeply incurious about you. There is something wonderfully solipsistic about being in these places, provoking a mood of melancholy reflection, of indulgent soul-searching, of escha-tological ponderings. You feel in a kind of social and moral limbo — you can’t even see the outside world because of the condensation and you can’t imagine what sort of a city contains these curious denizens eating their extraordinary food. But then, you ask yourself, what are you doing here, caff-haunter? Eating, drinking, hanging out. What does that say about you?…

Solipsistic, egalitarian, existential, democratic, esoteric, insouciant, disinterested, cheap — what kind of establishment offers you all this, plus baked beans, chips, fried bread, sausage, bacon, fried eggs, mushrooms, black pudding, bread and margarine, HP and tomato sauce and a chipped Pyrex cup of stewed tea? We should preserve these singular, beguiling places before they disappear but — and this is what adds the bizarre magic — how could you possibly achieve that? The very attempt to cherish and enshrine or consecrate removes everything special, destroys the quiddity of the establishment at once. It is as if there is a built-in, anti-tamper, self-destruct device designed to counteract our best arty-liberal-bourgeois intentions. The caff has evolved in these islands of its own accord — organically, mysteriously, almost unnoticed — and if one day it becomes extinct it will have been something self-willed, a kind of benign suicide, not driven out, not victim of an enforced, unnatural transformation, part radical chic, part heritage industry. All we can do is watch and contemplate these remarkable loci of our urban lives carefully, see how they adapt and change or die away, log and note them for posterity — and make sure to go in from time to time.

1998