Espresso is the country’s most successfully exported word, and its most misunderstood ritual. Notes from the import side.
At twenty to eight on a weekday morning, a bar in Bologna performs a piece of theatre so ordinary that nobody in it knows they are performing. A man in a suit says one word, “un caffè,” and does not specify further, because there is nothing further to specify. A small cup lands in front of him before he has finished unfolding his newspaper. He drinks it in two sips, still standing, exchanges four sentences with the barista about football or roadworks, leaves a coin on the saucer, and is gone. The whole ceremony takes ninety seconds. It would be easy for a foreigner to mistake it for haste.
It is the opposite of haste. It is punctuation. The Italian day is a long sentence, and espresso supplies its commas and full stops: one at arrival, one mid-morning, one after lunch to close the meal like a signature, perhaps one more when something deserves marking. The drink is small because the pause is the point, and a pause, by definition, cannot be large. Italians did not design a beverage and then build a habit around it. They designed a habit and then engineered, over a century of stubborn refinement, the exact beverage it required.
No country has exported a ritual’s vocabulary more successfully. Espresso, cappuccino, macchiato, barista: the words have conquered every high street and drive-through on earth, including the one at the end of my street in Vancouver. What did not survive the journey, almost anywhere, is the ritual itself. In North America, espresso became an engine rather than a destination, the concentrated base of drinks it disappears into, drinks the size of soup, drinks with lids, drinks for the car. The word travelled the world. The meaning, for the most part, stayed home.
Because in Italy the word has a meaning, and it is precise. There is a national institute in Italy that certifies what may call itself certified Italian espresso, and it publishes the parameters the way France publishes the boundaries of its wine appellations: the grams of ground coffee, the temperature of the water, the nine bars of pressure, the twenty-five seconds of extraction, the thirty millilitres in the cup with their standing of dense hazelnut foam. It is easy to smile at a country that legislates a coffee. I have come to read it differently. A culture writes rules around the things it cannot afford to lose.
I should say plainly that I am not Italian. I came to this ritual from the least romantic direction imaginable: as a trader. I run a small Vancouver house that imports Italian-roasted espresso into Canada, which means my education in Italian coffee culture happened by way of pallets and customs paperwork, shipping schedules and roast dates, the unglamorous logistics that stand between a roastery in Emilia-Romagna and a kitchen in British Columbia. It is a strange apprenticeship, learning a culture through its cargo. But cargo is honest. The bags themselves teach you. An Italian roaster prints the blend’s composition on the packet, the exact proportions of Arabica and Robusta, the way a serious winemaker names the grapes, because in Italy that information is not marketing. It is a promise, and the person opening the bag is expected to care.
What keeps me in this trade is not the shipping. It is a moment I have now watched many times, and it has not lost its interest. A Canadian customer, someone who has drunk coffee daily for thirty years, tastes a properly made Italian shot for the first time: the crema that holds for a moment under the sugar, the bitterness that arrives, resolves into something almost sweet, and leaves cleanly instead of lingering like a grudge. There is usually a pause. Then, more often than any other response, they mention a trip. Rome in 2015. A honeymoon in Positano. A conference in Milan they had otherwise entirely forgotten. The taste turns out to be the most durable souvenir Italy issues, and it waits, sometimes for decades, for a second sip to awaken it.
The ritual carries a social contract that also never made it through customs. At an Italian counter, the espresso is the great equalizer: the notary and the bricklayer stand at the same bank of the machine, drink the same thirty millilitres, and pay the same famously modest price, held down in some cities by custom so strong it might as well be law. Naples went further and invented the caffè sospeso, the suspended coffee: you drink one and pay for two, the second left on account for a stranger who cannot afford their own. A country reveals itself in what it attaches to its smallest habits. Italy attached dignity, equality, and quiet charity to a drink that lasts two sips.
So what would it actually mean to import espresso to Canada, beyond the beans, which are the easy part and my job? I think it would mean importing the pause. We drink coffee while walking, while driving, while typing; coffee as fuel, taken intravenously against the day. The Italian proposal is more radical than any brewing method: that several times a day, for one minute, you stop entirely and do one small thing with complete attention. The cup is small so that it cannot become an accompaniment to something else. It refuses to be multitasked. In a culture like ours, that refusal is nearly subversive.
I no longer believe the ritual is untranslatable. I have seen it take root here, one kitchen at a time: someone learns to stand still for ninety seconds with thirty millilitres of something made with care, and to treat that minute as owed to them. It is a small thing. So is a stamp on a passport. But every cup made properly in a Canadian kitchen is a little embassy, and in it, finally, Italy’s most exported ritual actually arrives.
Maysam Tehrani is the founder of Lusso Scelta a Vancouver house that curates Italian-roasted espresso for the Canadian market (lussoscelta.com).
