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In Ristretto, Oliver Strand, the curator of the Times Topics coffee page, explores the world of coffee gadgets, coffee beans and why it’s never been easier to get a perfect shot of espresso.

I just came back from Paris, a city where the cafes are as central to daily life as running water and perfectly knotted scarves. And yet the coffee is almost always disappointing.

I want to put it in stronger terms, but I’ll leave it to Duane Sorenson of Stumptown Coffee Roasters, who once asked me: “Why does the coffee in Paris suck so bad?”

Why, indeed?

Maybe it’s because Paris cafes do all the little things wrong: old beans, over-roasted beans, second-rate machines. Coffee is ground in batches, not to order. Ask for a café crème or noisette and out comes a box of U.H.T. milk, a shelf-stable dairy product. Even the venerable Cafés Verlet (256 rue Saint-Honoré, 011-33-01-42-606-739) ignores a basic rule and keeps roasted beans sitting around in open barrels.

The composition of most espresso blends doesn’t help things. James Freeman of Blue Bottle Coffee often points out that the French have a taste for robusta, a low-cost, low-quality bean that gives good crema but can taste thin and harsh. Or, to paraphrase a conversation I had with Corby Kummer, drinking robusta is like putting balsa wood in your mouth.

It’s a vivid image. No wonder some feel that the best coffee in Paris is Italian.

Though there’s another side to the argument. I spoke to Michael McCauley, the master roaster and bean buyer for the French coffee giant Cafés Richard, and yes, robusta is big: he told me that many espresso blends are about 25 percent robusta, down from about 35 percent a few decades ago. Cafés Richard’s leading blend is about 20 percent robusta, though some all-Arabica espressos are gaining in popularity.

And McCauley put French coffee into context. “The shots here are longer, because that’s what people like,” he said. “The flavors are different. The experience is different. A bowl of café au lait isn’t trying to be a cappuccino.”

Fair enough. Besides, the point of a Parisian cafe isn’t really the coffee.

It’s the ceremony and the people-watching, or at least it is at a regal establishment like le Rostand (6 Place Edmond Rostand, 011-33-01-43-546-158), where rows of wicker chairs colonize the sidewalk across the street from the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Sometimes it’s that impossible-to-pin-down cool factor. There’s a type of neighborhood cafe that changes nothing — not ownership, not décor — and for some reason is anointed with a fashionable following. Recently, a friend took me to Sans Souci (65 rue Jean-Baptiste Pigalle, 011-33-01-48-743-728), which is in a groovy area just below Place Pigalle that’s all guitar shops and brothels. It’s indistinguishable from the cafe across the street and yet has become a social HQ for the kind of young, bookish, flirty Parisians who make smoking still seem sexy.

But the coffee? It sucks so bad.

On this last trip, I went to one coffee place worth visiting.

And it’s the same place several coffee nuts told me to go to, from James Hoffmann of Square Mile Coffee Roasters to Nicholas Cho of Wrecking Ball Coffee Roasters. Even New Numbers, a Brooklyn band, pointed me there in 140 characters or less via Twitter. (They threw in a twitpic, too.)

It’s La Caféothèque (52 rue de l’Hôtel de Ville, 011-33-01-53-018-384), and it’s delightful.

Nicolas Clerc

It doesn’t look anything like a French cafe (no tables outside) or an American coffee bar (no visible tattoos). Actually, it feels less like a coffee shop than a candle shop, and it’s so homey, so disarming, it takes a moment to register that it’s for purists: single-origin espresso drinks only, made with direct-trade beans roasted in-house.

The espresso changes daily. There’s a pipsqueak three-kilo roaster in the front and a coffee bar in the back. Whole beans are available for sale, about 20 varieties at any given time. (I’ll quickly clear up a confusion among the coffee cognoscenti: La Caféothèque is the same thing as Soluna-Cafés — La Caféothèque is the store and the cafe, Soluna-Cafés is the roaster and brand of coffee beans.)

La Caféothèque was started in 2005 by Gloria Montenegro de Chirouze, the former Guatemalan ambassador to France. She runs it like a country inn: she dotes on her customers, she chats in multiple languages, she smiles. All the baristas smile.

And all the baristas take their job seriously, which is maybe what sets it apart from the other cafes in Paris — they pay attention to the espresso, they steam milk with some artistry and flair. It stands out in a city where most work a coffee machine with the slack enthusiasm of a 19th-century laborer.

The strangest thing is that Parisians don’t seem to care. McCauley of Cafés Richard thinks because coffee is everywhere, it’s become “a given,” and taken for granted, though he feels things are improving.

Montenegro de Chirouze put it less diplomatically. “The French have an analytical palate, but they haven’t been exposed to good coffee,” she said. “Once I brought some very nice coffee from Guatemala to the coffee importer in Le Havre and made them try some. They said it was too good for the French.”