"Reading" My Turkish Coffee
WHAT: “Reading My Coffee”
WHO: Director of a Turkish winery
WHERE: Istanbul, at the outdoor café of a hotel, right at the Bosphorus River
WHEN: Late afternoon, October 14, 2014
WHAT ELSE:
Turkish coffee is legendary and the ritual of it is intriguing, even for a non-coffee drinker. (That’s me.) But what I didn’t know until this afternoon was how much more intriguing is having someone “read your coffee.”
You finish drinking the cup of coffee, which is always served on a saucer. You turn the cup over, rim-down on the saucer. There is quite a lot of thick sediment or residue at the bottom of a cup of Turkish coffee, so when you turn the cup over, there is no flow of remaining thin liquid that pours out into the saucer. Instead, there might be a small overflow that very slowly seeps out from under the rim.
Then, someone who knows how to “read coffee” lifts up the cup. She studies the inside of the cup, as well as what’s left on the saucer. Here’s what she saw in mine: a big fish, which usually means “huge luck.” That luck may take half a day or half a month or half a year to happen, but it will happen.
Right away I thought about my book project and seeing it come to fruition. I don’t know if that’s what was meant by the big fish, but I’m happy to take it as a sign of that.