Specialty coffee in Paris.

Paris has always been a city of cafés and, for most of the last century, of bad coffee: dark, bitter, often padded with robusta, drunk fast at a zinc counter or slowly on a terrace with enough sugar to hide it. The change began in 2005, when a former Guatemalan ambassador opened La Caféothèque by the Seine with drawers of single origins and a counter for slow brewing. It took a decade for the city to catch up with her.

What Paris built after that is unusual. The roasters kept the blend, the assemblage, and gave it the seriousness of wine, naming coffees like châteaux. The terrace stayed: KB in South Pigalle and La Fontaine de Belleville pour excellent coffee to people who still want to sit outside for an hour. And at the far end of the scale, a reservation-only counter with no sugar, no takeaway cups and no music treats a cup of coffee like a tasting menu.

Between the two, a working scene: a roaster whose founder holds a state craft title, a champion-roaster competition every year, multi-roaster cafés that pour Sey and Onyx beside the local beans, and Australians who brought the brunch. The Paris Coffee Show gathers the whole French trade at the Parc Floral every September.

The big houses came first. Coutume roasts a single profile meant to work in an espresso machine, a filter cone and an office bean-to-cup, and pours it in a Left Bank flagship on Rue de Babylone. Terres de Café runs shops from the Marais to the Eiffel Tower and puts Panamanian and Colombian Gesha in the window. Belleville Brûlerie built the modern wholesale trade on blends with names like Château Belleville, pays farmers well above the fair-trade rate and plants trees in Brazil with every bag. Lomi roasts and teaches in the eighteenth.

The second generation roasts lighter and talks more. KB Coffee Roasters roasts for its own terrace and for others at its Back in Black facility; Kawa roasts very light, bright and floral, and sells it in orange bags. Tanat, Early Bird, Liperli, Loutsa, L'Arbre à Café, Bel Horizon and the neighbourhood roasters of Les brûleries de quartier fill the shelf between them. And Substance stands alone, roasting competition lots on a small machine for a room that seats a handful of people by appointment.

Gloria Montenegro opened the counter that started it and taught the vocabulary. Christophe Servell built Terres de Café and won the national roasting title. David Flynn, Thomas Lehoux and Anselme Blayney made the blend respectable again at Belleville. Paul Arnephy carries the state craft title for roasting and now roasts under his own name. Joachim Morceau turned coffee service into a tasting menu at Substance and defends long-life milk on the grounds that it gets out of the coffee's way. And Thomas at Motors Coffee, a former French brewing champion, pours everyone else's coffee.

Paris does not have one coffee district. Each arrondissement got the scene it deserved.

An espresso at the counter, a noisette, a café crème on the terrace, and now a flat white and a filter for the people who came for the beans. The shelf is more French than most: Colombia, Ethiopia and Costa Rica lead the listed origins, washed leads the processes with natural behind it, and the assemblage, the house blend named and defended like a wine, sits at the front of nearly every catalog.

Roast styles live side by side. Coutume and Belleville roast for chocolate and caramel, the profile the restaurants want; Kawa roasts as light as the Nordics and pulls long, bright espresso; Substance freezes its green coffee and its roasted coffee alike to stop the clock. Decaf gets proper attention here, with Coutume selling it at full specialty prices. The live count stands at 9 decaf and 19 filter-friendly listings.

Paris prices run from the house blends of the wholesale roasters to Gesha at the top of the Terres de Café shelf. These numbers come from every Paris coffee currently listed with a price, not a sample we chose. The going rate today is €69 per kilogram, about €17 for a standard bag.

The ladder reads like this: the assemblages and washed Latin Americans around €56 per kilogram, East Africans and the first experimental lots from about €107 per kilogram, and the most expensive listing right now at €369 per kilogram. 172 coffees carry a price today. The bigger roasters ship across Europe and run subscriptions; the small ones sell over their own counters first.