My coffee place

Café San Jose - 2 stars
Rue des Petits Champs, Paris 75002

I've already pointed out that my company's Paris office is just a block from the old Bibliothèque Nationale (National Library, known to the regulars as the BN) where I spent most of my days when I lived in Paris back in 1994. I just spent a week in the office, and although everything else has changed, my favorite coffee place hasn’t.

Café San Jose is not your typical Parisian café with little tables on the sidewalk, a bar with an assortment of drinks, and the black-and-white-clad waiters immortalized in Jean-Paul Sartre's Being and Nothingness, which I remember reading, largely at Au Bon Pain (in Cambridge), the summer before my senior year of college. It's a tiny place with a counter, a couple of stools, an espresso machine, and, around 1 pm, a crowd of people drinking coffee with tiny little squares of chocolate. When I arrived at the BN, my friends who already lived in Paris introduced me to the Café San Jose as the place to go - if you wanted something other than the coffee that came out of the machines in the library, which was so bad it appealed to that feeling that you were supposed to suffer during graduate school - and I introduced it to my friends who came later.

I was there to help teach a training program for our European employees, based in London, Paris, and Munich. From a quality-of-life standpoint, it was one of my worst trips ever - late nights at the office, missing the Liverpool-Arsenal game, eating the same box lunch from Casse Croute every day (it's the best lunch in a box I've ever had, but it got a little old), and not a single side trip to Berthillon, Mulot, Poilâne, or any of the other culinary landmarks of my Paris. But from another standpoint, it was a great experience to work closely with a small team of highly capable and intelligent people who all get along and have fun together. It also allowed me to do perhaps the two things I enjoy most of all in the business world: explain things and give advice. And when I needed a break, I would go to the Café San Jose with Eileen to gossip and complain.

There are few things more rewarding in the business world (or any world) than the feeling of being part of a community that you actually want to be part of, and I would rather have that than a good croissant au beurre. Of course, the croissants au beurre from the place on the corner were better than anything you can find in the United States.