Here’s Your Affogato Fuck You

Take It As An Enema

I thought I smelled something rotten, and it wasn’t Denmark, it’s Paris.

And no, I’m not talking about the piss-stained sidewalks, the underarm fug on the métro, or the regular whiff of centuries-old urine ghosts still haunting the 10th arrondissement. That’s Paris. That’s character. That’s the smell of a city with memory.

What’s rotten is something worse. It’s an infestation. Not rats. Not Airbnb. Not even les trottinettes. I’m talking about the sudden, metastatic proliferation of so-called “specialty coffee shops.”

Not cafés, mind you. Not those tarnished-brass, nicotine-tinted sanctuaries with chipped saucers and old men playing PMU while arguing about Algeria. I mean "coffee shops", the dead-eyed IKEA spawn of algorithm-driven aesthetics and venture capital, springing up like pustules every two meters. You can’t turn around without being smacked in the face by reclaimed wood, exposed filament bulbs, and the scent of Rwandan single-origin optimism.

For the record, there are 1,410 coffee shops in Paris now. Let that number rot in your teeth for a moment. This isn’t urban growth, it’s a fucking hostile takeover.

Every day I step out to sidestep the hordes of cockroach-like humanity (the full spectrum is cockroach-like to consumerist zombies to tourists although they all seem to coagulate everywhere that is not a quartier populaire which is a fancy word for the hoods where poor people live) and I see voilà, bam! well looky here boys and girls, what do you know, it’s a brand new specialty coffee shop has just opened up, right before our very eyes. Aren’t we lucky the luckiest citizens on EARTH?

Who are these places for?

They aren’t for Parisians, that’s for a zillion percent sure.

They aren’t for the old ladies with shopping carts either. Nor the starving students who can’t afford a meal more expensive than a plastic spoonful of Les Cup Noodles as they call them here.

Fuck no.

These dens of frothy fakery whose uniformity is engineered specifically for lifestyle migrants and brand-addled freelancers, desperate for an identity and willing to pay €6 for what is, ultimately, a tiny cup of fucking coffee.

Coffee, kids. Not diamond mines. Coffee.

You can grow the beans in monkey feces or pluck out the eyes of llamas and roll Arabica in their empty sockets, but it’s still fucking coffee. And once you’ve gotten past that dishwater-through-a-rag Americano, if you’re honest with yourself (and not just chasing some trendy new phenomenon to feel like you belong in this shitty world instead of being a new bacteria cultured in a petri dish), there’s little to no fucking difference between one torrified bean and the next.

Coffee is a bitter brownish fluid we invented to tolerate life. Not to spring forward some new sense of identity for a new group of trendy automatons pretending their zero life conformity is a personal brand.

Meanwhile, the number of real Parisian cafés has fallen by 40% in twenty years.

Studies show that this overall decline in the number of cafés in Paris has one major factor: The very sharp rise in competition from shitty foreign fast food (McDonalds, Five Guys, Burger King, KFC and Popeyes, etc) and this majestically unoriginal proliferation of this fake specialty coffee shop.

The banker pig and his penny-ante sycophants don’t care that Café de l’Aurore has been there since the Algerian War. It cares about churn rates and foot traffic density. It sees a tiny local brasserie and thinks, “Perfect spot for a coffee shoebox serving turmeric macchiatos to digital nomads named Zoë.”

Because like every other greedy little pig feeding their pig jowls with visions of profit and growth, they hate humanity.

Humanity isn’t profitable.

As a result, Gare du Nord now has a Popeyes. Blanche has a Five Guys. Every street and boulevard is fast becoming a food court of corporate chain processed shit food.

Why? Because it’s cheaper.

Why? Because these people want to see any vestiges of humanity wiped out.

They want to see humanity reduced to predictable market trends.

They don’t want things like history and culture and humanity mucking up their fucking profit margins.

Humanity is a side hustle to these fucks.

The soul of the city and its cafés are being hollowed out and replaced with fucking these specialty coffee shops with their tote bags, specialty coffee mugs, specialty whole beans, self-curated playlists, and ethically sourced nothingness.

There’s no room in all this sterility for conversation, or chaos, or cigarette smoke curling over a saucer. People are too busy taking selfies next to their aesthetically pleasing placemat or hunching over screens, pretending to be human, pretending the latte is art.

And speaking of latte, imagine this insane fucking scenario:

You exit your building and enter one of these places because unless you can fly 50 metres above the street level, you aren’t going to be able to avoid stepping into one of these cultural hemorrhoids if you want to get down the street.

First of all, yes, forgetting the fact there is no terrasse, no table service, no character, no people of interest, you can’t even walk up to the counter and give your fucking order. If you want to order something you have to interact with a fucking machine to do it. Never mind that there are five or ten Gen Z robots standing around behind the counter staring off into the vast emptiness of their subconscious. You can’t ask them to take your order. They are too busy reliving imaginary traumas from a gust of wind that blew by them too fast and scared them when they were three years old to bother with some triviality like taking a fucking coffee order in a coffee specialty shop.

Second of all, you feel like you are in some sort of sterilised space station operating theatre performing lobotomies on extra terrestrials to determine if there are enough regoliths or rare earth elements to mine out of their fucking alien heads. If a crumb from a piece of Japanese cheesecake happens to fall off your lip towards the floor, one of those traumatised Gen Z automatons will be there faster than the crumb can register in your brain, sliding across the floor with their hands cupped like Tom Cruise catching his mother’s crystal egg and saving it from upper middle class fragility.

In any case, these shops are microwave bunkers of culture, all aesthetics, no roots. They don't need to be lived in, just photographed. They don't serve a neighborhood, they serve an algorithm.

And they’re multiplying. Like cultural cockroaches. You open a door in the Marais and one scurries out in the 11th. Your 165-meter-long street already has five, but here comes a sixth, wedged between a gluten-free mooncake emporium and a gender-neutral haircut commune.

So no, I’m not angry that someone likes their beans light-roasted and hand-massaged by Peruvian monks. I’m angry that we’re sacrificing history, disorder, personality, smell, and soul on the altar of bland global sameness, disguised as “independent charm.”

The next time someone says, “Oh, have you tried that new place with the amazing Colombian pour-over on Rue des Martyrs?” go ahead and smash whatever marketing jargon and microplastics are left in those pinata-shaped heads of theirs.

And then take them to a real café. One that stinks. One that serves wine before noon. One where the waiter insults you for asking what kind of milk they use.

That’s Paris.

Not this fucking curated nightmare.