Several Hundred Thousand People Optimised for the Same Thing

The same café has opened in every city on earth. Subway tile, filament bulbs, reclaimed wood, potted monstera, a particular espresso machine, oat milk, a chalkboard in a familiar hand. It is in Lisbon and Seoul and Medellín and Tbilisi, and it is not a chain. Nobody franchised it. It arrived independently, everywhere, within about a decade, and how that happened is more interesting than the eye-rolling it usually attracts.

The mechanism

Photographs, and the systems that sort them. A café’s customers are found substantially through images, and images are ranked by engagement, and engagement rewards a particular set of visual properties: high contrast, warm light, uncluttered surfaces, legible materials, a shallow depth of field over a cup on a wooden table.

A design that photographs well gets seen; a design that gets seen gets copied; a design that gets copied becomes the reference for the next person opening a café. That is a feedback loop with a fixed point, and the fixed point looks like this. It is convergent evolution driven substantially by how images circulate and are ranked — alongside the barista training circuit and the owners who came home from working abroad — which is why it happened in so many places at once with no coordination between them.

Supply chains did the rest. Speciality coffee equipment, roasting knowledge, training and the furniture itself are globally traded, and the standard fit-out is now cheaper and easier to source than a distinctive one anywhere with a container port. Doing something else costs more and is riskier.

Nobody imposed this aesthetic. Several hundred thousand owners independently optimised for the same ranking function, and it has one answer.

The case against the complaint

The traveller’s objection is that difference is being erased, and the objection deserves interrogation rather than agreement. What actually spread was a set of quality standards — properly stored coffee, calibrated grinding, water at the right temperature, staff who were trained — and in a great many cities these cafés are visibly better than what they replaced. The people running them are usually local, frequently young, often returned from working abroad, and they are running businesses that keep their money in the city.

There is also something faintly absurd about a visitor who arrived by air, using a globally standardised booking platform, on a phone made in three countries, objecting that the local café has adopted an international standard. The demand for other people’s architecture to stay picturesque is the authenticity argument again, wearing a flat white.

And the aesthetic is not as uniform as the complaint suggests. Look past the tile and the local variation is substantial: what is eaten with the coffee, when people come, whether they sit, how long they stay, whether the room is quiet or loud. The fit-out converged; the social use of the room did not.

What is genuinely lost

Something real, and it is worth being precise about it. The older institution the new café frequently replaces — the ordinary bar with a metal counter, the tea house, the coffee house with a fifty-year regular clientele — served a different function. Cheap, all-day, open early, standing room, a newspaper on a stick, and social in a way a laptop-friendly speciality café is not and does not try to be.

Those places are disappearing for reasons that mostly have nothing to do with coffee: rent, succession, the fact that nobody wants to work those hours, and a generation of owners retiring with no one to take the licence. The replacement is visible and photogenic; the disappearance is neither, which is why the causation gets assigned wrongly.

The useful practice

Not to boycott the good café, which would be both joyless and pointless. It is to also go to the old one — earlier in the day, at the counter, standing up, ordering the thing everyone else is ordering and not asking for it to be changed.

It is usually two streets away from the one with the queue outside, it costs a third as much, nobody will photograph it, and it is the room where the city actually talks to itself. That is a better reason to go than authenticity, and unlike authenticity it survives being written down.