Saly Noémi: Café?! Változatok és változások Időszaki kiállítás 2007. február–május (Budapest, 2007)

new coffee places got a foothold in the city and their viability, even in this confined markel drilling from crisis to crisis, seems certain. Thus we are reassured that arguments dwelling on the necessity of the cafés and their chances of survival following the long historical interval, would be senseless and do not even come up; we had ample opportunity to get entangled in these during the first two-thirds of the 1990s. Our coffee houses, cafés and coffee shops in an economic sense, of course, will not gel a free ride into the future, while their elimination as a type of institution would only be possible today and in the foreseeable future at the price of a new collectivist cataclysm, whose political representation has dropped to the clinically justifiable minimum. This welcome change has also rehabilitated ihe concepts associated with drinking coffee in the language that had been missing for some time. The word 'café' once again entered popular usage and its nostalgic shades of meaning, looking back into the past, have faded away beside the ones denoting ils present function. By now, even in a sociologically mixed group of arbitrary ages, we can recount with confidence and optimism Wilhelm Drostes experience in 1982 when, entering the country by train, he got himself into a pretty pickle regarding the naming of his occupation. Upon hearing the word 'kávés' or café owner, the border-guards thought that he was mocking them: after all, anyone can spill coffee on himself - like Alfonso in that excellent advert! - so thai his shirt or trousers could be 'kávés" or coffee-stained, but there is no way he could have cotfee as an occupation. True, there are no longer, nor will there ever be again, cashier ladies, coffee-sipping matrons, girls with their breadbaskets, paperboys, cigar and post boys; there are, however, coffee-making bartenders. The phrase thai provides the title of this introduction is a nice example of the return ol a coffee drinking 'concept vocabulary' to the language. I caughi it last week on the number one tram, from the conversation between two young men of about thirty, which was otherwise not in the least a discussion about cultural history. Budapesi, with its own good five hundred coffee places of various types, is today a city newly alive, a bustling base of operations for coffee drinking. It is once again the city ol cafés, is what would slip easily out of our mouths. If this were lo happen, it would be advisable to roll this around on our tongues and say instead: the city of coffee shops. For it is evident thai the present composition of public places for drinking coffee is extremely diverse - it is precisely ihe presentation of this diversity thai is one of the main aims of the present exhibition

1 - and within (his il is also clear ihat the surviving old type of ('grand') cafés, renovated or reopened, are only present on the palette of various sub-categories as examples. (At the lime of writing, the latest of these was Café Callas at Andrássy út 20 - on the site of the former Windsor, Roma, and cafés of other names - exemplary in its evocation ol the interior design as it once existed!) And then there is the inevitable feature all the old and new places, which can be considered the heirs to the 'grand café' tradition, have in common. They are calé-reslaurants which, without exception, fulfil all the functions of a restaurant, and there is not one that would continue ils business confining itself to ihe narrow scope of coflee and the hot and cold dishes of a traditional café. It is, alter all, this kind of café that can be called the prototype m the historic sense of the word. This - or the different faces of the café-restaurant, changing according to time of day or separate space allotted - was 'the' café, at the