Jean-Paul Sartre at the table

Sartre did not eat according to the starter-main-dessert liturgy of a bourgeois dining room. His real table was the café: you settle in at the Flore or Les Deux Magots, order little and at any time, between two pages of writing. The meal organizes itself around the counter and the banquette — a small cold dish quickly served (egg, charcuterie), a quick hot dish when hunger strikes (croque), the never-ending coffee, and the real dinner reserved for evenings when you remake the world with friends. The structure is not on the plate, it is in the rhythm of work and conversation.

More than an ingredient, the fuel of existentialism. Black coffee, drunk cup after cup from morning to evening, accompanies every dish and every line. It links all these recipes as it linked Sartre's days: bitter, burning, never far from the pipe and the notebook.