Why do I like this cafe? With a name nearly synonymous with the excellent movie starring the late Brad Davis, where the hero is caught smuggling hashish into Istanbul and spends an ugly time in gaol. Something which I had serendipitously avoided the same year, 1969, when I, young and foolhardy Aussie that I was, and perhaps, still am, was invited to take a half kilo of the best Mt Ketama hash from Tangiers to Paris. I look back on that time with wry amusement as I could have easily been caught by the Guardia Civil in Spain, but, as always, I was looked after from above, and survived my first month in Paris with the sale to new friends of a very good smoke.
Anyway back to the cafe, Midnight Espresso, it's not that it has good food and coffee, but there is such a vast array of personalities who attend the bar and who frequent the cafe. A whole coffee-table book of photographs would not do them justice, as this is the real Cuba Street, seemingly a direct descendant of New York's Greenwich Village in the sixties, when I was there for a brief sojourn, and which totally does it justice. With no hyperbole, I can say that this cafe, without a skerrick of pretension, carries all the alternate culture that the Village did at that exciting time, with probably a greater variety of accents to boot. See photo!
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