Kafejnica

Perhaps one of my Latvian friends will help me out here and give me the proper plural form of kafejnīca. (An update here: I have been informed that the plural is kafenīcas.) Latvian is very inflection-heavy -- there are seven cases for nouns, for example, and it's unlikely that I will even begin to master the subtleties of gender, plurals, polite versus informal forms, and so on in my time here.

But kafejnīcas, which I'll simplify by just calling them cafés, are everywhere. I explored them when I got here because my kitchen in my flat was not fully installed when I moved in, and like everything in the Baltics, what should take two or three hours often takes two or three days. That was fine with me. It was an excuse to explore the many cafés of Daugavpills.

But that's not really a very good translation because there is such a wide range of these kinds of little places. Some of them, I am guessing, are throwbacks to what the Poles under communism called a "milk bar," a worker's cafeteria where you could get a plain, maybe stodgy, but filling lunch on the cheap. Some are rather fancier than that, cafés in the more French sense where you linger over a cup of coffee and a pastry. Some are cafeteria-style; some are sit down-and-be-served. Some are both. All are wonderful.

The thing that distinguishes them from real, full dining experience restaurants is that they tend more toward late breakfast and lunch than dinner; they tend to be busiest over the lunch hour. The cafeteria "milk bar" types like Vēsma or Mego (connected to a Mego supermarket) is that you pick up a tray and choose your food, much the way you did in high school. There is always a zupa (soup) and three or four entrees: fish cakes, chicken cutlets in various cream sauces, breaded pork cutlets. These plump little cutlets are called cepelini ("TSEP eh lee nee") because of their resemblance to, well, a zeppelin. There's usually two or three salati and a dessert case of compotes, puddings, fruit cups, and so on. You point and pick, and a nice lady fills up your plate with largish portions. You pay, you eat, you're done -- generally for about 3 or 4 euros. (The current exchange rate is about 1 euro for $1.07.)

Other cafés like Šokoladņa specialize in little cups of cappuccino and, like its name suggests ("shaw ko LOD nyuh"), chocolates: chocolate covered dates, chocolate mousses, truffles. You don't really eat a full meal here unless you want to go into a sugar coma, but these places tend to be full in the evenings, where people stop after doing their evening shopping for a pick-me-up.

Cafés like Luna (whose tagline is, in English, "Good food. Even better coffee") do a brisk business in coffees, light meals, and pizza, which you can get pretty much everywhere. Luna has cornered the market on Daugavpil's hiperati; a lot of younger students hang out here late at night, some of them obviously on dates, others paying rapt attention to their cell phones. Vēsma also has a part of its restaurant that serves pizza and light meals. This part of the restaurant, confusingly, is called Wasaby [sic], which I couldn't figure out until I saw the complete sushi menu. Vēsma is pretty much everything to everybody.

Others specialize a bit more. I haven't been in a kafejnīca called Ukrainska Hatka, but its menu is Ukrainian, and its zupa of the day must be borscht. Another sells burbuļu teja. I did not expect to find bubble tea in Daugavpils, and my acquaintance Natalija had as hard a time wrapping her head around this concept as I did when I first encountered it on Guam years ago.

It's not hard to eat out here, though I suspect that these cafés do such business because they are generally cheap and filling. Incomes are lower here than in the the U.S. and the rest of the European Union, but this does not stop people from public socializing and seeing and being seen. Hanging out in a kafejnīca is one way to do just that.