Cafe ‘Ino: Patti Smith’s favourite café
Within all of Patti Smith’s memoirs, she spends large amounts of time in cafés, frequenting them no matter the hour or place. They’re a space to take a break from crowded streets, retreat into temporary respite and solitude, to reflect, observe, and drink coffee. Cafés are also, of course, great meeting places, welcoming transience and a flow of bodies, which float in and out of the door, some stopping for hours, some for just ten minutes.
Throughout history, many important people from significant political and artistic movements have penned their manifestos at worn café tables, with rings of drink stains on the wood and crumbs beneath their feet. Works of great literature have been written in battered notebooks as the scent of frothy milk and warm sugar has filled the room, and great discussions have been had, voices blending with the sound of a boiling kettle or a coffee machine.
For Smith, cafés have always been an idealistic concept, and they were something she was never privy to as a youngster. She dreamt up images of herself writing as she watched the world go by from the comfort of a table nestled in the corner of a cosy café. In M Train, her second memoir, following on from her most acclaimed piece of literature, Just Kids, Smith elucidates on her youthful fantasies and obsession with such places. “I suppose it began with reading of the café life of the Beats, surrealists, and French symbolist poets.”
She finally moved to New York in the mid-1960s, where “nothing seemed more romantic than just to sit and write poetry in a Greenwich Village café”. Attracted to the places that artists frequented before her, Smith wanted to immerse herself in the same atmospheres. Perhaps some of their literary and philosophical genius was still lingering in the air, trapped between the walls or in the picture frames that lined them.
One of the Greenwich Village cafés that Smith came to love was Café ‘Ino, where she wrote many of the words which formed M Train, reflecting on her relationships, family and travels. She became attached to the place, but it ultimately closed its doors in 2013, just two years before the book was published. She frequents the café throughout, forming a friendship with one of the workers, Zak, who leaves to set up his own beach café, something Smith had always wanted to do herself.
In many chapters, she reads books while sitting at her specific table and gets served her usual order of brown toast, a dish of olive oil for dipping, and black coffee, often “without asking for it.” Flip to any page and you’ll likely find a reference to the café.
In the section ‘Tempest Air Dreams’, Smith realises that the café is closing, “It didn’t register at first, but then I realised that the blood-orange awning with ‘Ino across it was missing.” Getting her final coffee, she reflects on the café’s steadfast reliability, soon to be gone forever. “I looked at my corner. I saw myself sitting there on countless mornings through countless years.”
Luckily for Smith, the table and chair she sat at for over a decade were not lost forever, unlike the café. The owner, Jason, gifted her the furniture as a parting gift, allowing her to always own a piece of one of her favourite places—Café ‘Ino.
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