Paris, January 10th, 2025.

Dear Oat-Milk Purveyors, Scone-Sourcers & Iced-Latte Aficionados,

Let’s start on a happy note, I’m glad you’re here.

Sure, you have your naysayers (my husband) but I, for one, am thrilled you’ve come. It was about time. For years I made epic journeys across the Left Bank to its only Starbucks, in search of a semi-decent coffee I could roam free with. Today, watching newly-converted Parisians gingerly learn to walk with their takeaway coffee cups is a sight that still takes me aback, though not an unwelcome one.

I love an old school banquette and rude-chic aproned waiter who looks like he’s going to spit in my latte when I inquire about “lait vegetale” as much of the next foreigner, but the novelty does eventually wear off. Plus the espresso from those machines usually tastes like pipi de rat. So, the day the heavens opened, the “Brooklynization of Paris” took hold, and you were suddenly everywhere, I, for one, was not complaining.

Until you got greedy.

You see, I was willing to overlook the absurd overpricing of your proposition, silently pay six euros fifty for ok coffee mixed with liquid apparently milked from a sacred nut by cherubs wearing Hermes gloves. Who among us hasn’t splurged with a smile and even the occasional tip via your fancy new tip-demanding cash register (why should tips be reserved for table service anyway, you seem to ask. Astoundingly, we don’t question this question.)

But now, you’ve gone a step too far.

It is true that by banning freelancers from writing, designing, editing, composing, brainstorming, in your café, you will sell more coffees faster. The math is so simple even us liberal arts graduates will agree: shift more people, sell more lattes, make more cash. But what you fail to consider is the lasting potential of your establishment. Particularly in this town.

What makes a café legendary? The ideas that were produced in it, that’s what.

Remember. Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast while shacking up rent-free at Closerie des Lilas. A broke JK Rowling dreamt up Harry Potter while making a single coffee last as long as she could at Edinburgh’s Elephant House.

No one was silly enough to kick Sartre out of the upstairs room at Cafe de Flore while he scrambled to complete Being and Nothingness as the Nazis marched through Paris, and the owners of Rio’s iconic Veloso cafe certainly never regretted letting composer Antonio Carlos Jobim and poet Vinicius de Moraes hang around a little longer while they finished composing ‘The Girl from Ipanema’.

Sure, the writer you’re ousting could just be an annoying Substack scribbler like yours truly. But they might be one of our generation’s great new authors, like my friend Emma Knight who would never have completed her The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus while juggling two young kids at home without our favourite Toronto writing haunt, the aptly named Ezra’s Pound.

As for the places that fancy themselves intellectual salons where urban sophisticates come together to debate and bat their eyelashes without screens: you’ve missed a beat. You think that by banning laptops you’ll be The Shop Around the Corner when in fact, in doing so, you’re nothing but the big bad Fox Books.

For Sartre may have scribbled with a more picturesque pen and paper, but newsflash: no one does that anymore. I’d love to file a scribbled transcript by air mail or phone it in like an Evelyn Waugh character but any editor would think I was off my rocker.

By banning laptops, you are stifling an entire creative generation’s production cycle, condemning young freelancers to wander the city aimlessly in search of somewhere to write without having a claustrophobia-induced nervous breakdown in their tiny apartments. For those of us with kids, factor this drama one-hundred-fold per child. There’s zero chance I can write in my “home office” (dining room) these days. I’m lucky enough if I can compose an email.

Ultimately, by banning laptops, you’re indirectly reserving independent creative work for the very wealthy indeed: those in this city who can afford to rent an office entirely separate from their homes. Also, only tourists and people of extreme leisure have time to come read your hardcover book collection over cinnamon buns on a Tuesday morning, as charming as the idea may seem. And who is it you think is writing these books for you then sell at a cheeky premium anyway?

One more thing: it’s telling that you allow influencers to “work” (take photos) in your establishments all day. Being myself the most cringe kind of influencer (fashion) I’ll go ahead and say it: where the hell are your priorities?

To those cafés in Paris with the sustained intelligence to resist this shift and stoically allow a MacBook or two, I both thank and commend you. Below is a list of my favourite addresses at which to write.

As for the rest, the choice is yours: quick cash-in or the slow cultivation of cultural importance leading to decades of lasting loyalty? No one will ever remember you if the best thing that was ever created within your four walls was a post-pilates selfie.

Invest in both your own future and others’ and avoid the inevitable, unsavoury aftertaste of irrelevance seeping into your cappuccinos.

Love, Monica.