Which is the earliest recorded coffee house?
The earliest recorded COFFEE HOUSE was the Kiva Han, opened in Constantinople in 1475. In the following century coffee houses acquired the sobriquet Mekteb-i fan, meaning ‘schools of the cultured’. The practice of serving coffee with sugar and milk was introduced by a Polish adventurer called Franz Georg Kolshitsky, who opened a coffee house in Vienna’s Domgasse in 1683. He was also the originator of me style of coffee known as ‘Viennese’, straining it to produce a clear liquid without grounds. Coffee was introduced by Anthony Sherley following an expedition to Persia in 1599 in an unsuccessful attempt to form an alliance between Queen Elizabeth and Shah Abbas. An account of the expedition by William Parry published in 1621 is notable for the first use of the word coffee in print in England. The beans sold for £ 5 an ounce in London. Not surprisingly at this price, coffee drinking failed to replace ale as the national beverage. John Evelyn, who was at Balliol College, Oxford from 1637 to 1640, recorded in the first volume of his celebrated diary: ‘There came in my time to the College one Nathaniel Conopios, out of Greece … He was the first I ever saw drink coffee; which custom came not into England till thirty years after.’
