Other food items

Though Charles II later tried to suppress the London coffeehouses as "places where the disaffected met, and spread scandalous reports concerning the conduct of His Majesty and his Ministers", the public flocked to them. They were great social levellers, open to all men and indifferent to social status, and as a result associated with equality and republicanism. More generally, coffee houses became meeting places where business could be carried on, news exchanged and the London Gazette (government announcements) read. Lloyd's of London had its origins in a coffeehouse run by Edward Lloyd, where underwriters of ship insurance met to do business. By 1739 there were 551 coffeehouses in London; each attracted a particular clientele divided by occupation or attitude, such as Tories and Whigs, wits and , merchants and lawyers, booksellers and authors, men of fashion or the of the old city center. According to one French visitor, the , coffeehouses, "where you have the right to read all the papers for and against the government," were the "seats of English liberty.

The banning of women from was not universal, but does appear to have been common in Europe. In Germany women frequented them, but in England and France they were banned. purportedly wore drag to gain entrance to a in Paris . In a well-known engraving of a Parisian coffeehouse of c. 1700 [2], the gentlemen hang their hats on pegs and sit at long communal tables strewn with papers and writing implements. Coffeepots are ranged at an open fire, with a hanging cauldron of boiling water. The only woman present presides, separated in a canopied booth, from which she serves coffee in tall cups.Traditional Central in Vienna, Austria