Of the psychoactive substances discussed in Michael Pollan’s This Is Your Mind on Plants (Penguin Press, 2021), opium and mescaline are the scariest, caffeine the most benign. Yet, he argues, no other stimulant has had a more perverse impact on the modern psyche. Caffeine dosed out in cups of coffee loosened human behavior from the grip of natural circadian rhythms and fastened thinking to the linear logic of capitalism. It all started in seventeenth-century London coffeehouses, which became places of trade themselves: Lloyd’s Coffee House begat Lloyd’s of London, the insurance brokerage, while the London Stock Exchange is said to have emerged from business done in Jonathan’s Coffee House.
Hoping to place myself in this analeptic arc, I dropped by Conwell Coffee Hall at 20 Exchange Place, which formerly housed the City Bank Farmers Trust, now known as Citibank. Even in the early morning, the café was moody and low-lit. The décor borrows heavily from the visual language of finance—a reversal of the historic trend observed by Pollan, perhaps. I ordered a double espresso through a glass teller window; as I waited, feeling each productive second slip through my fingers, I looked around the high-ceilinged art deco countinghouse of old before glancing over at my fellow caffeine users, not one harried banking associate among them. Instead, they had the look of tourists slouched over a parbaked kouign-amann—the ideal demographic for the new “immersive theater production” that will soon be staged in the space after hours. Maybe caffeine is falling out of style in halls of capital, whose grunts now get their fix from something a bit stronger.
Go to enjoy the ambiance and ample seating, but the coffee is nothing special. 2 beans out of 5.