15. Coffee and Cafés

Odesa is a city of cafés. Although it seems to me that probably every other Ukrainian city is too. Because wherever I go in Ukraine, I see that Ukrainians love coffee and cafés. Which perhaps makes some readers wonder whether Ukraine is not a tea country. Yes, I myself wondered at first as well. And I am still a bit surprised seeing so many coffee shops and coffee drinkers, which is why I try to investigate the topic a little deeper.

So I found a study on the Pew Research Center website from ten years ago, that shows that Ukraine is on the border between tea and coffee world - people drink more tea than coffee in the east and vice versa in the west of the country. After a bit more online browsing, I also came across a rather plausible claim that the onset of full-scale war in 2022 caused supply problems in the country (which may be the reason for the appearance on menus of all sorts of coffee drinks with all sorts of evocative names - there isn’t much real coffee needed to make all those drinks which contain a lot of milk, syrup, flavorings and sugar), but also that people in general started drinking more coffee.

There could be several reasons for this at first glance contradictory circumstance. Firstly, people may have started to drink more coffee because of stress, nervousness, insomnia. Secondly, especially in western Ukraine, people have always drunk more coffee than tea (this is old Austria-Hungary, after all!), and the millions of Ukrainian refugees who have left the country are mainly from the eastern regions of Ukraine, where people drink more tea, dipping the countrywide balance more towards the coffee-culture.

And thirdly, perhaps Ukrainians have started to drink more coffee as a result of the country’s overall unambiguous turn to the West. But this last is pure speculation. However, testing the hypothesis on the Ukrainians, they do not laugh at me, but are instead stuck in thought...

In any case, as far as Odesa is concerned, my own observations tell me that while Odesites don’t necessarily drink more coffee than tea, coffee drinking as an activity is more visible and probably really on the increase.

Not only is the city full of all sorts of cafés: cozy, stylish, quirky, surprising, with a long history or only a month old - and disappearing again in a month - serving a variety of exotic and temptingly named coffee drinks, often unfamiliar not only to me, an old tea drinker, but often raising eyebrows among my coffee-loving Ukrainian acquaintances as well. And there really is a coffee stall on every corner. Or a coffee van.

The latter perhaps needs clarification. For example, there is an old yellow delivery van parked almost in front of my house, next to the city hall building. Not the old IZH 2715 - Moskvitch “pie wagon” - as it was called in the Soviet times, but a slightly more modern western analogue. There is a hatch in the side of the car, which when opened becomes a table, and behind the hatch, in the cargo area, a coffee machine. In the car sits a young man who, when there are no customers, looks intently at his smartphone, but otherwise pours coffee, froths milk, chats to the city hall employees who come in for a coffee break, and generally seems to do good business. The coffee, if I’m not mistaken, costs forty or fifty hryvnias, or around one euro. And in addition to the usual coffee, the menu includes milk coffee, cocoa, tea and a range of other coffee drinks whose names mean nothing to me.

And there is nothing unique or special about this delivery van, it is an established business model. Vans like this can be found in crowded places all over the city. This is despite the fact that my friends and colleagues who are coffee connoisseurs keep telling me that the coffee in these kind places is disgusting.

Disgusting, then disgusting... As with restaurants and bars, there is a huge stratification in Odesa when it comes to coffee. The price difference between the cheapest and the most expensive coffee is more than double. The same goes for tea, hot chocolate and anything else that cafés, coffee stalls or coffee vans offer.

But in general, the Odesite appreciates coffee and wants the best kind of it. According to personal habits and the thickness of the wallet, of course, but as far as I talk to people, everyone has a clear idea, understanding and preference of what a good coffee should be and where to get the best.

So it’s quite common for my female colleagues to come to work, coffee cups in hand. Or occasionally slip out to fetch a cup of coffee either from the basement café next door, the fine Godshot across the street, or the Isla on Rishelievska. This despite the fact that we have a decent coffee machine in the office. At one point even two coffee machines.

“Why don’t you use our own coffeemaker?” I ask.

“Because it doesn’t make good coffee.”

“But I’ve seen that sometimes you do use it.”

“Well, when I don’t have time to go out or when the weather is bad.”

So coffee is both a consumable and a necessary fuel, as well as a treat. As the situation and possibilities dictate. A drink that looks the same can have a very different taste, flavor and price depending on where you buy it. Between the kiosk at the market gate and probably the best and most pleasant coffee chain in Odesa, the Foundation, there are not just a few kilometers of urban space, but a whole conceptual universe, which, again, pretty well defines Odesa.

Namely, at one end of this universe is the hard-working poor living in a still more or less post-Soviet mindset and environment, for whom a cup of cheap coffee is above all a small stimulus to get them through a hard day’s work. At the other end of the spectrum, however, it is not necessarily posh café-chain, but one that holds out a comparison with the trendiest spots in any Western metropolis, with a menu that offers coffee according to the country of origin of the beans, as well as all kind of trendy stuff from kombucha to fine artisan chocolate.

It is also interesting to note that while, for example, the Foundation has a nice selection of cakes and snacks, other places also known for their good coffee do not offer much in the way of edibles. At first, this is a little surprising: I enter a café where there is a counter with a glass display case, but underneath the display case there is, for example, only a bowl of macaroons (which are also sold in Odesa, if not on every corner, then on every other corner) or one or two cakes. I automatically think it’s the war and the resulting misery, but after a while I realize it’s the concept, because of course there are cafés with counters full of cakes, biscuits and croissants, both sweet and salty.

But it’s clear that just as the war has changed the whole of Odesa, it is also having an impact on the café scene. Some places have closed down, some have certainly changed their product range and pricing (although it is difficult to assess this accurately without having visited Odesa before the war), and some are brand new.

As mentioned before, cafes are constantly appearing and disappearing. One reason for this is the influx of refugees from the east. Café owners have arrived in Odesa from Kherson, Melitopol, Mariupol, or Berdyansk, bringing with them the concepts they had in their now-occupied or even destroyed places, and are attempting to revitalize them in their new location. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t - both suitable clients and a relevant environment are needed. As real estate is cheap, there are plenty of bold experimenters, both refugees and enterprising Odesites. It only took me a month away in Tbilisi to find that new places had opened up while some old ones had disappeared in downtown Odesa, a phenomenon that never ceased to amaze me.

But on the whole, Odesa’s coffee and café scene is rich and varied, and it luckily also has something to offer to the die-hard tea drinker like me. My favorite place - partly out of convenience, as it’s close to my home - is “12 Coffee and Croissants” on Langeron Street, next to the opera house, with a rich selection of cakes, croissants and food, and a back terrace in the Palais-Royal garden, where it’s lovely to sit in the warm weather.