The plaque on the Café Procope in Paris calls it the oldest continually operating cafe in the world, but the record says otherwise. Its founder, Sicilian chef Procopio Cutò, started as apprentice to an Armenian named Pascal, who sold lemonade and gritty boiled coffee from a wooden stall on a muddy Paris street until the venture collapsed in 1675 and he fled to London. Procopio diagnosed an image problem, and in 1686 he bought a defunct public bathhouse nicknamed the Cavern and rebuilt it with marble tables, crystal chandeliers, and expensive mirrors modeled on Versailles.

In 1689 the Comédie Française opened across the street, and the cafe became the city’s post-theater salon, then an engine of the Enlightenment where Diderot and d’Alembert planned the Encyclopédie. By 1702 Procopio had renamed himself François Procope. Police spies called les mouches took notes on patrons, and during the Revolution Robespierre, Danton, and Marat met there while Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and John Paul Jones stopped in. The original business closed in 1872, passed through several identities including Au Grand Soleil, and only regained the Procope name and an 18th century look in the late 1980s.

• Procopio dressed his French waiters in Armenian costumes to sell an exotic luxury fantasy to wealthy Parisians.
• In 1752 Rousseau walked out of his own play Narcissus and complained about it at the Procope.
• Voltaire reportedly drank up to 40 cups of coffee a day, mixed with chocolate.
• The red Phrygian cap of liberty is documented as making its first appearance at the cafe.
• The true oldest continuous coffee house is Oxford’s Queens Lane Coffee House, open since 1654.