Caffè? Caffè?

 

All images © Valery Rizzo

Café Regular in Park Slope, I have to say is my favorite place to pick up my morning decaf cappuccino with skim milk. It's the most similar in feeling to the cafés in Europe, where you order and either stand or sit at the bar. The coffee is also the best tasting and fresh and doesn't give you that been sitting around for hours burnt taste in your mouth. They have newspapers you can read, fresh squeezed orange juice, pastries and even hard-boiled eggs as I imagine one would get in France. They also have a selection of specialty Tumbador chocolates made right here in Brooklyn. One morning I placed my order alongside author and journalist Christopher Hitchens.

While I am too young to remember the last and only time I was in Paris, it also reminded me of the bars in Italy. There was the time my cousin Antonietta’s husband Antonio and a friend took us for a drive down the Amalfi Coast one evening. We stopped in every town along the way, in each one we would step into a bar and Antonio would turn to us and say very fast, pointing at each one of us, caffè? caffè? We would bang it down and then be off to the next town. Not wanting to be the American that would instead ask for water I went along and by the end of the night between all the espresso and the curves in the road I thought I might have heart failure :-)


Café Regular du Nord, 158A Berkeley Place, between 6th and 7th Ave, Park Slope, Brooklyn.