At Breton's, the meal does not follow the bourgeois starter-main-dessert order: it revolves around the counter and the long café table. People gather in the late afternoon at the Café de la Place Blanche, order a single daily special to share, pass around bottles of table wine, fill notebooks with automatic writing, play exquisite corpse, and finish with a strong coffee that stretches the conversation into the night. The ritual is not the sequence of dishes but the duration at the table: eating is a pretext for encounter and play of the mind.

Breton, frugal and nocturnal, made strong coffee the fuel of surrealist evenings: a small bitter black coffee, unsweetened or nearly so, drunk standing at the zinc counter or seated for hours. It is the recurring note of his entire table—bitterness, steam, and an eye open to the marvelous.