Café Méert in Vieux Lille

I practically never use the canteen at the office. I prefer to have a sandwich and see what’s new in the World, courtesy of the BBC News website or, perhaps, I look in on the blog to see what the level, location and sources of interest have been. Other reasons for my not particularly liking the canteen at work include the fact that, were I to fancy something hot to eat, the service system would see me standing in line for up to 10 minutes, waiting to pay whilst my food went tepid in my hands and then, once at a table eating, the buzz of several hundred French voices all around me would leave me needing to ask my tablemates to repeat just about everything they tried to say to me as their French would just get lost in amongst all the rest.

In the outside World, to me, a café of any kind holds very limited appeal. Cups of tea, sugary waffles, big lumps of fancy-looking cake and little chocolate “tourist treats” don’t really amount to “my kinds of things” and the clientele of such places would probably, albeit inadvertently, make me feel uneasy and out of place. Bars and brasseries are much more my kinds of places. Lille, of course, offers plenty of bars and plenty of cafés but, even to a non-café-frequenter like me, it seems clear that there are cafés…… and then there’s Café Méert.

Architecturally, the fascia of the building is impressive and, judging by what I’ve seen of the interior, the incredibly ornate décor continues throughout. My Mum invariably passes an hour or so there each time she’s over here…. usually when I’m safely out of the way at work. She assures me that the quality of the fare is every bit as good as it should be in a café as attractive as this one. Apparently, the patisserie, the chocolates, the coffee, the service and everything else are all a noticeable cut above the rest. I’ll content myself with her word for that and the evidence offered by the photos I took of the Easter window displays a couple of weeks ago.

Café Méert is on Rue Esquermoise in Vieux Lille, 5 minutes’ walk from the Grande Place and 5 minutes’ walk from where I’m typing this.