Frappé now has a photo group on flickr.com called – what else? – Frappé Nation. You are invited to browse the group’s first submissions. Hopefully this will inspire you to take your own frappé photos – at home, on location, on vacation – and to add your favorite ones to the growing exhibition. For basic instructions on how to prepare the frothiest possible frappé, go to frappé recipe.
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We are obviously not the only ones who love to slowly sip frappés at the Achillion Cafe on Leoforos Nikis, the coastal drive of Thessaloniki. The cafe and the panoramic photo of it (see photo above) are featured in a terrific new frappé blog called frappezZzation.
The café was opened in 1963 by Stefanos Emmanouil, who, during his honeymoon in Corfu, visited the gardens of the Achillion Palace. He was so struck by the naked beauty of its statue of a dying Achilles (see below left) that he too named his palace in the hero’s honor.
No, somehow Warhol never got around to painting the frappé. So we commissioned the Welsh illustrator and designer Jonathan Ball of poked/studio to reimagine the frothy frappé glass as a pop art creation. Ball employed vector graphics to create his contemporary image and then applied colors in a style suggestive of Warhol.
For the Frappé Nation book launch in Athens, Ball crafted these fine serigraph art prints in two limited editions. Printed on high quality archival paper, each serigraph print is numbered and signed in pencil by the artist.
In “Frappé Nation” we hinted that a frappé drinker’s attachment to his or her flexible drinking straw can border on the fetichistic. We recognized that holding or fiddling with a straw is itself a ritual that may either relieve or result from tension and boredom, much like holding a cigarette, doodling, texting, or playing with worry beads. But we paid very little attention to the color of the straw, assuming that color selection was more a matter of chance than choice.
Nescafé obviously thinks that straw color is significant. In its frappé ads and packaging the straw is invariably blue (or blue-and-white striped), the blue probably used for its Greek symbolism as well as it universality as an indicator of something cold.
At Egomio, a café in the affluent Glyfada suburb of Athens, straw color is used by the barmen to help servers identify the contents of a frappé glass: green is for “sketos” (unsweetened), black is for “metrios” (medium sweet), pink is for “glykos” (sweet) – the implication maybe being that sweet is for girls. A bent straw identifies a frappé me gala (with milk); a straight straw, a frappé horis gala (without milk). (We will leave the implication of the straight and bent straws to others.)
Besides symbolism and coding, straw color may also be a matter of fashion. From our visits to hip cafés, cafeterias, and lounge bars throughout Greece it has become clear to us that when color matters, only one color matters: black
Not exactly. According to popular legend, the frappé was invented in September 1957 at the Thessaloniki International Fair. Working at an exhibit for Andreas Dritsas, then the Greek distributor of Nestlé products, sales representative Dimitrios Vakondios made an important discovery. Reportedly there was no hot water available. Maybe he merely desired cold refreshment. Either way, Vakondios grabbed a shaker meant for Nesquik, the Nestlé cocoa drink, filled it instead with Nescafé instant coffee and cold water, and shook it vigorously. Not accounting for the burst of foam this action would generate, Vakondios achieved two results: The first outcome was the staining of his business suit; the second, the invention of the foamy concoction that would become known as frappé.
Thus frappé was invented not so much by Nescafé as by a sales rep for the company’s Greek distributor. Sadly, the municipality of Thessaloniki, though popularly known as “Frappedoupoli” (Frappe City), has yet to erect a public memorial in honor of the man who shook the first frappé, the late Dimitrios Vakondios.
The first sip of a frappé deposits a sweet, cool, bold coffee taste in the mouth. Although decaffeinated Nescafé provides the same initial thrill, only with the regular version can this pleasurable sensation be appreciated as the first signal of the restorative effects already making their way through the body. Yet it is the anticipation of these, more than their realization, that alters moods instantaneously. The distance between glum silence and spirited chattiness can sometimes be measured by the length of a straw. But the caffeine, though it comes from “instant” coffee and is felt in a matter of minutes, takes about 30 minutes to be absorbed through the stomach and small intestine and reach peak levels in the bloodstream. The time required for the body to eliminate one-half of consumed caffeine – the so-called “caffeine half-life” – is three to four hours for nonsmoking adults, much less for smokers.
So just how long is the frappé moment? It can be, (A), the length of the first sip, roughly one second; (B), the elapsed time between the first and last sip, say one to two hours; or, (C), the period from the first sip until the caffeine contained in the last sip – as well as the animated conversation fuelled by it – slowly fades to its “half-life”, from three to six hours. When a moment can last one second or 21,600 seconds, that already is pretty extraordinary. And no one says you can’t stay for another moment.
