Where Ideas Once Sat Together: The Decline of Europe’s Café Life

Europe’s modern culture and history cannot be fully understood without its cafés, as philosopher George Steiner argued. “From Pessoa’s favourite café in Lisbon to the Odessa cafés frequented by Isaak Babel’s gangsters,” he wrote in “The Idea of Europe,” “the café is a place for rendezvous and conspiracy, for intellectual debate and gossip, for the flâneur, and for the poet or metaphysician with his notebook.” And yet, cafés are vanishing. Across the continent, cafés, pubs, and nightclubs are disappearing at an alarming pace. Where are the intellectuals, conspirators, lovers, and poets hiding now?

In France, there are 70% fewer nightclubs today than in the 1980s. In the United Kingdom, more than 30% of those that remained have closed in the past five years. In Italy, only half of those that existed at the end of the last century are still operating. Cafés that once brought together the intellectual and artistic elite—such as Café Comercial in Madrid, Café Griesteidl in Vienna, or the Pillar of Hercules in London—have been closing over the last quarter-century. Some iconic venues, like Venice’s Florian, face imminent closure after an 80% drop in sales following the pandemic, having endured years of what its manager calls a “slow death.”

I visited Caffè Florian, Italy’s oldest, twenty years ago. Silver trays, velvet chairs and walls, freshly roasted almonds. Pieces of European history in every corner. The price of a glass of rum was steep, yet I gladly paid it to soak in the illustrious atmosphere of a place that radiated cultural vibrancy. Back then, tacky and rude tourists coexisted with elderly gentlemen obsessed with the humanities, dressed in their best attire to enjoy Saturday drinks at the Florian, as they had for fifty years, and as their parents—or favourite artists—probably had before them.

It’s not that younger generations are socialising elsewhere, but rather that their social universe is shrinking to a point of infinite narrowness, excluding the spontaneous encounters once found in Europe’s nightlife. Studies indicate that young people now prefer to have fun at home, alone or with a small circle of close friends, limiting their interactions with others to digital spaces.

Steiner distinguished between old European cafés, English and Irish pubs, and “the American bar,” a “sanctuary of dim light, even darkness.” He argued that old cafés bore witness to European history and literature, serving as neighbourhood meeting points and hosts for social gatherings, and he somewhat disdained the “psychological fabric impregnated with sexuality” of American cocktail bars. Steiner contrasted Europe’s bars—where inhabitants had walked every road, “traced their maps from village to village”—with the rest of the world, with its different scales and lifestyles. The European bar is born of proximity, of familiarity, and, like a private club, often retains a certain mystery. For the philosopher, American literature, history, or politics wouldn’t collapse if their bars closed—but European politics would. Something vital dies with the mass closure of cafés and pubs.

It would be a mistake to reduce the hospitality crisis to the mere disappearance of drinking and flirting—though both are part of life, and of pub life, and they humanise us. The current trend toward domestic isolation, avoiding strangers, missing out on different perspectives, or skipping impromptu conversations has the opposite effect: it dehumanises.

The disappearance of cafés and pubs is not a natural evolution of leisure. It’s not the closure of old video rental shops, the decline of cinemas, or the fading of arcades with video game machines. Those forms of leisure have relocated: streaming platforms, online games, and consoles. Cafés and pubs cannot be replaced in the same way—they have long been pillars of European social life and channels for cultural exchange: from concerts to poetry readings, from gatherings to conversation itself, which enriches all participants.

European bars have always been, and remain, places of immense pleasure. “There is no private house,” Samuel Johnson told his biographer James Boswell, “in which people can enjoy themselves so well as at a capital tavern. Whereas, at a tavern, there is a general freedom from anxiety … there is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.”

This summer, while exploring the historical archives of Spanish Television, I came across a talk show from the 1980s hosted by Spanish actor Fernando Fernán Gómez. Several intellectuals discussed the rapid disappearance of cultural gatherings in Europe’s great cafés, a topic chronicled by many writers and artists. They argued that younger generations in the late 20th century were bored with conversation and preferred pubs with loud music where talking was impossible. That debate had the usual intergenerational tension but also reflected a real shift: café gatherings were vanishing, and nightlife was changing course. The difference today is that we are no longer reaching a way station, but a terminus.

By 2025, the outlook is bleaker. Even the forms of socialisation that emerged in the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s are disappearing.

Some hospitality associations and unions, driven by interventionist policies popularised by social democracy in the EU, call on city councils and governments to save venues. The Netherlands and Germany have implemented solutions to protect local nightlife as a cultural asset, channeling public aid. Yet state protection often distorts these activities and discourages private initiative, condemning venues to closure once public funding ends. It is not a true solution.

Many conservatives focus more on the decline of reading habits than on pub closures, but we must remember: these are not just places to get drunk. They are cultural icons, catalysts for social bonds, neighbourhood ties, and cultural exchange since the 19th century.

If we look at the causes, the first is government-imposed lockdowns during the pandemic. Excessive and unscientific measures destroyed the income of hospitality businesses for months and ‘re-educated’ a generation to spend leisure time at home. Those old enough to begin visiting pubs and clubs discovered a socially less demanding, cheaper, and ultimately satisfying alternative—or so they believe.

The second cause is lack of public safety. Europe’s ‘globalist and multicultural’ reality has left hundreds of urban neighbourhoods where going out alone at night carries serious risks. Some French cities have even imposed curfews on children under 16 because safety cannot be guaranteed.

The third cause is youth impoverishment—a phenomenon largely ignored by EU policymakers, as it would require measures social democrats are reluctant to implement, such as more flexible hiring or tighter rules for unemployment benefits.

Steiner died believing his homeland was a table, a café, and a book. The historic cafés map he described has been partially realised by the Council of Europe, which now highlights major cafés in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Austria. Not all are truly historic, and some notable ones are missing, but that is politics. Visiting the Historic Cafes Route offers a glimpse of melancholy: cafés have been institutionalised, preserved like museums, because in the wild they can no longer survive on their own.