Télescope Café

David Flynn is something of a coffee purist, and his newly opened Télescope Café has a stripped-down look to it; whitewashed walls with no decoration, a big pale blue wooden counter with a plate of cakes, Marzocco espresso machine and a strange water-heating device which he says is called an ‘über-boiler’. When he serves a glass of water with your coffee it comes from a sleek siphon rather than from the tap, and don’t ask for free Wi-Fi: as David says, ‘it is not our concept’. It doesn’t seem to bother his regulars, who are a cross-section of office workers, Anglophone expats and Japanese, as the location is just off Paris’s bustling Japanese quarter between Palais Royal and Opera Garnier.

Even the coffee menu looks pretty minimalist – no trendy flat whites here – but it turns out that Télescope also doubles as a coffee roaster, only keeping small stocks of beans to ensure freshness, from 3-5 different plantations that come from diverse regions as Kenya, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Honduras and soon Brazil and Colombia. The eclectic music is one of the crucial elements to this café, ranging from 70s free jazz to soul, blues and tango, and many of this new generation of baristas seem to be wannabe DJs too. Flynn is half English, half American, learned his trade back in the States working in Washington’s Murky Café, and has been in Paris the last three years making a name for himself co-organising Frog Fight barista events, including a pop-up mobile cafe outside the Centre Pompidou. Downstairs from the café is an ancient vaulted cellar, which is used for coffee tastings.