“Most interesting cultural things emanate from restaurants,” Jeremy King told Monocle when he showed us around his newest project in London – the revitalisation of the beloved Simpson’s in the Strand. Yet today, hospitality isn’t geared around cooking up clever cultural concepts. Instead, the clattering of keyboards, zoom calls and menus downloaded anonymously via QR codes increasingly make us closed off to chance encounters.
 
But this hasn’t always been the case. In the 19th and 20th centuries, a ritual emerged in Europe’s metropolitan brasseries and coffee houses, where spirited intellectual artistic exchanges took place and fostered new ideas. Collectively known as literary cafés, these venues had three things in common: they offered a politically neutral space, were in central locations and served simple but reliable fare: a Comté omelette in Paris or goulash soup in Vienna. 

In October this year Rome’s Antico Caffè Greco, which predates Italy’s unification, closed its doors. Its illustrious patrons included Charles Baudelaire, Federico Fellini and Sophia Loren. A month later, Café Gijón, Madrid’s last remaining literary café, was quietly sold to a chain. Founded in 1888, this bastion of old Spanish hospitality hosted tertulias – clandestine get-togethers where the likes of poet Federico García Lorca, playwright Antonio Buero Vallejo and novelist Francisco Umbral gathered to seek shelter from the Franco regime. More than just a pit stop for a reasonably priced café con leche, the space was a crucible of radical ideas that would shape artistic thought for decades to come.

Today’s patrons need spaces like these in which to ruminate or meet new people. After all, there’s little inspiration to be found in a congealed burger delivered via Uber Eats. Yet many of the remaining institutions trade off their heritage, using it as cultural leverage to justify average coffee and kitschy desserts. Guests dine out on lacklustre pillars of nostalgia, while ghosts of the intellectual elite are mere status symbols. Takeaway culture and slapdash lunch breaks have also eaten away at the romantic, languid meals of hospitality's golden era.
 
So how do we revive the café? A cluster of new-wave chef-restaurateurs has the right idea, with well-designed, multi-hyphenated hospitality spots that engage with neighbouring artistic programmes. Turkish chef Maksut Aşkar introduces Anatolian flavours within Rotterdam’s newest cultural venue, Fenix, a museum dedicated to migration in a city now home to 170 nationalities. In Tanzhaus, Zürich’s brutalist contemporary dance centre, Café Nude is a fitting hub for a cultural movement; patrons can glimpse the performers warming up on the upper levels. And in London, chef José Pizarro’s restaurant, Keeper’s House in the Royal Academy of Arts, boasts walls laden with canvases, inviting patrons to dine with fellow art lovers.

Some emblematic haunts remain. In Vienna in 1913, Austro-Hungarian foreign minister Count Leopold Berchtold predicted that Leon Trotsky, a regular at Café Central, would one day lead the Russian Revolution (or so the story goes). And in wartime Paris, Jean-Paul Sartre patronised Café de Flore, formulating the embryonic notion of existentialism. But these surviving literary cafés need to work harder to bring patrons together rather than luring in tourists over a parody of a bygone literary heyday.
 
Some of the most extraordinary ideas have been thought up over a croque-monsieur and a glass of sancerre. In Europe, solo dining now accounts for roughly one in six restaurant visits, so why not follow the crowd and book a table for one or chance a bar stool?Linger a while in a convivial café, bistro or pub – you might just find yourself in good company.

Claudia Jacob is a Monocle writer. For more opinion and analysis, subscribe to Monocle today.

An outspoken advocate of Chile’s former dictator Augusto Pinochet has won the Chilean presidency (writes Jack Simpson). José Antonio Kast, a conservative hardliner, won 58 per cent of the vote on Sunday with a campaign that centred on Chileans’ fears regarding crime and immigration. It marks a sharp right-wing turn for the country. While debate continues over how much he has exploited those fears, crime has risen in recent years.

“There are more organised and violent criminal gangs in the country, including one called Tren de Aragua, originally a Venezuelan gang that has also been targeted by the Trump administration,” says Antônio Sampaio, an expert on Latin American politics and security at King’s College London. “While Chile is much safer and more secure than neighbouring countries, crime has indeed increased. Brutal, targeted killings are more common compared to five years ago”. Meanwhile, immigration – notably from Venezuela in the wake of the nation’s economic collapse – has grown substantially. 
                                                      
Kast, the son of German postwar immigrants, tows a hard line on immigration. He has vowed to expel tens of thousands of migrants from the country with only the clothes on their backs, as well as build walls along the Bolivian and Peruvian borders. “His victory speech was typically magnanimous and he promised to govern for all Chileans,” says Sampaio. But Chile has changed a lot since Pinochet – notably being able to now hold its leaders to account – and the realities of leadership will test whether this authoritarian can retain a firm grip when the fears that he has mined become his problem.

“This place reminds me of my grandfather’s cabin,” says Brazilian-Norwegian singer Charlotte Dos Santos. “To me, that smell of pine walls and crackling firewood is Norway.” Shrouded in fog almost 500 metres above Oslo, Frognerseteren restaurant has been serving skiers since the 19th century. It’s here in a room that the country’s king sometimes reserves for dinner that the 35-year-old musician meets Monocle to discuss her latest EP, Neve Azul – her first major project since her debut album, Morpho, in 2022.

Recorded live to analogue tape and released by Dos Santos’s own label, True Node Records, the project is a departure from her first two albums. “I’ve always written and produced my music myself, doing all of my arrangements, but I missed collaborating,” she says. “I wanted to go back to the basics and have musicians playing live together in a room, like during my classical jazz training.”

The result is a five-song collection that feels more intentional, with a vintage sound. Its title track, “Neve Azul”, is a bossa-nova-infused ode to the Pyrenees, written after a long drive that Dos Santos once took through Spain and France. It was pieced together from ideas that she had while in the driver’s seat, looking out at azure-tinted ridges and cobalt crests in the distance. “That blue and my synaesthesia helped me to form the song right away,” she says.

Dos Santos, who was raised in the High North, says that its landscapes are intertwined with her imagination. “I grew up chasing trolls and fairies around my grandfather’s cabin,” she says. “I had this huge inner world.” Today she finds it easier to tap into that inner world in winter.

In Monocle’s Alpino newspaper, we sit down with Dos Santos to learn more about how Oslo’s creative scene is changing and what makes winter a good season for new ideas.You can read about it here.