Upon the drinking of a cup of coffee, Balzac wrote, "everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march in to motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages."

Less militantly, the young girl Lieschen responds to her father Herr Schlendrian, in the libretto to Bach's Coffee Cantata, "Dear father, don't be so strict! If I can't have my little demi-tasse of coffee three times a day, I'm just a dried-up piece of roast goat." The cantata was premiered at Zimmerman's Coffee House in Leipzig in 1732.

Turk's Head, a coffee house in the Strand in London, was the site of many humorous conversations between Samuel Johnson, Oliver Goldsmith, the actor David Garrick, Edmund Burke, and Sir Joshua Reynolds the painter, from 1763 to 1783. Other members of the circle were Thomas Percy, historian Edward Gibbon, and economist Adam Smith. Parts of these conversations were immortalized in The Life of Samuel Johnson by JamesBoswell, considered by most to be the greatest biography of all time.

Ingrid Bergman, her eyes glistening with excitement and remembered love for Humphrey Bogart, says to a flirtatious Sidney Greenstreet "Thank you for your coffee, seignor. I shall miss that when we leave Casablanca."

A certain kind of writer, I believe, was put on this earth to sit in cafes. I am one of them. I have written large parts of several books in numerous cafes around the world, and I find in such places a very welcoming ambiance for reading, conversation, contemplation and, sometimes, even the beginning of love. Of course I find coffee there as well.

So when I began thinking about great cafes, I was already warmly comfortable with the idea of any café. I've enjoyed hundreds.

But a great café. . . Great cafés are great in part because of what's happened there. Edward Lloyd's coffee house in Abchurch Lane, London in the 1690's served a clientele that underwrote insurance for ships and their cargoes. Though all he did was to provide a place for these transactions to be made, his name was immortalized by one of those businesses, the founders of which called it Lloyd's of London. At the Tontine Coffee House at the corner of Wall and Water Streets in New York, an upstairs room was rented in 1793 so that brokers dealing shares in various business concerns could trade in a quiet, centrally located and more reserved atmosphere than that outside under the buttonwood trees, in the open air and muddy streets. It was not until several years later that that "market" moved to even more staid quarters up the block a few doors, to be renamed "The New York Stock Exchange".

In contemporary times, you visit the Dôme in Paris and you imagine the scratch of Hemingway's pen making its way across the slowly diminishing white of the sheet of paper before him. At the Procope, also in Paris, you enjoy the fact that this is the first true café in the world in the modern sense of the idea, founded in 1686 by Francesco Procopio dei Coltelli. So, in this café you get to hear the scratch of Voltaire's pen, and occasionally even that of Benjamin Franklin. You go to the Café Tortoni in Buenos Aires and you envision -- in the lush remains of the aerated milk down the side of the ceramic coffee cup -- the tangos that the immortal Carlos Gardel sang for the great but uncomprehending playwright Luigi Pirandello one night in 1933, the year before Pirandello won the Nobel Prize for Literature. At the CaffeTrieste in San Francisco, you sit among the lost generation of aging beatnik patrons and hear the declaiming voices of the now long-gone Ginsberg, Burroughs and Keroac.

In such cafes, the color, the odors, the pleasure are all augmented by the kinds of conversations that have taken place in them and the identities of those having the conversations. History warms the room and gives the very coffee itself a kind of luxurious glow, a different taste altogether.

Great cafes are, each one of them, entirely unique. No two great cafes are alike, and it may be that the elements that make one café great do not exist in another great cafe.

But there are a few criteria that I think every great café must have. Without at least a majority of these, a café simply doesn't make it. The requirements are pedestrian enough, obvious beyond words. However, given the corporatization of the world in recent decades, globalization, the bottom line as the only line, etc., it turns out that most cafes worldwide are out of the running. Almost none of them stands a chance.

*Coffees and teas must be served in ceramic cups, on saucers, with a small metal spoon where required.

*Other liquids, such as water, must be served in glass containers.

*Food must be served on ceramic plates with proper silverware and a napkin.

*There must be comfortable chairs on which to sit and a comfortable table at which to sit.

*The café need not be open twenty-four hours a day, but it must be open in the morning. Being open very late into the night is also preferred, since late hours foster boisterous talk.

*There should be no ambiance of hurried quickness in the partaking of food and drink. That is, no pressure on the patron to get his order and get the hell out.

*The descriptions of the fare and personnel should be made in the proper common vernacular of whatever city in question, with no cutesy-pie made-up marketing jargon. For example you mustn't rename a cappuccino as something else simply in order to differentiate your product. And of course great cafes don't require. . . in fact they eschew. . . the idea that the person behind the counter be called a barista, a word that doesn't exist, or at least shouldn't.

Otherwise there are no rigid laws, no bar examinations to pass, no board requirements.There are simply the grand, mysterious combinations of elements -- the long ago whisperings wherein great history was plotted, the thrill of a famous caress beneath the table, a great tranquil river running by outside beneath the trees, the finally completed immortal poem, the startling discovery drawn up on a napkin, the great, great cup of coffee -- that elevate some few cafés to a place of excellence and pleasure that almost no others can hope to achieve.

Thus, here begins my exploration of cafes. . . of great cafes. I have my pen and paper with me, and will be writing -- in occasional articles -- about the ones I find.