There are worse places for a morning coffee than Kahveci Mustafa Amca Jean’s. Sitting on one of the stools in the quiet courtyard off İstiklal Avenue, I realise I’m not the only one to think so: a street cat has found a seat of his own, too, curled up on a cushion beside me in the sun’s gentle rays. A quiet clattering of cups comes from the tiny kitchen in the corner.
“We have a saying in Turkish,” says Duygu Doğuç, “‘Eat sweet, talk sweet.’ If you just want to chat, we drink sweet tea. If you want a serious talk, then we have coffee.”
I’m expecting, then, an earnest conversation with my guide from Istanbul Tour Studio as we sip strong, bitter cups of Turkish coffee, but it never comes. In fact, as I reach the end of my drink, Duygu turns the cup upside down on the saucer with a wry smile. “Ok, let’s have a look.” She flips it back over and peers inside, trying to divine shapes from the formless brown sludge. No luck. “Ah, I don’t know. Did you know there’s an app for reading coffee grounds now, anyway?”
This should hardly come as a surprise. As Duygu explains, the digitisation of kahve falı — fortune-telling with coffee grounds — is just another chapter in the long, winding tale of Turkish coffee culture. It’s a story that goes back centuries: the first coffeehouse in Istanbul was opened in 1555 by two merchants from Damascus, who’d brought beans from the
Arabian Peninsula. There, in the mountains of Yemen, coffee was sipped day and night by Sufi mystics to induce spiritual states. By the end of the 1500s, it had taken on a more earthly purpose as
