Cafes of Turin: Some Places where Ordinary Folks have their Coffee and Lunch

The thing I love most about Turin is, the locals take their coffee seriously. And they do it in style too, with healthy salads, delicious pastas, fruit salads and other goodies on the side.

1. EXKI, Turin 
Around the corner of my hotel near some of Turin's most exclusive shopping areas, is a self-service cafe-restaurant which offers tasty food made of organic ingredients and good coffee made with Illy coffee beans.

Although Italy is well known for its gourment culture, the concept of organic farming and bio-food have only recently taken hold in the social consciousness of city-dwellers in Italy. Maybe that's because most Italians still eat relatively well - nutritious and healthy - compared to their Northern American counterparts, and the taste and variety of agricultural produces available in Italy's markets are still very 'local' in terms of origins, unlike some other industrialised countries in western Europe such as UK or the Netherlands, where a large proportion of fruits and vegetables are no longer home-grown; hence there is no such great urgency in Italy to convert to the religion of organic supremacy, or to promote organic foods by all means.

Still, the trend of organic farming has caught on in Italy. Turin is now the base of 'Slow Food' movement, a campaign calling for preservation of traditional varieties of agricultural produces and the use of locally grown fresh produce and ingredients with indigenous flavours instead of industrially-grown, bland-tasting supermarket varieties.

EXKI is a self-service organic food cafe chain which offers Illy coffees at reasonable prices. You first choose whatever you like to have from their shelves, then proceed to the counter to order your drinks and pay for your food. There are microwaves inside the premises, you can heat up your pasta or soup whilst you wait for your coffee. In addition to coffee and espresso, they also have freshly squeezed fruit juice and smoothies available.
 

Seatings are available at EXKI cafes, you can spend your lunch break looking at what was going on on the streets of Turin's posh shopping districts.

2. Marido Cafe, Turin

Who could have failed to notice that giant Illy espresso cup on display outside the cafe? It certainly caught my attention, so I decided to go in and have a look what was available.

Every cafe in Turin has a small blackboard somewhere inside the shop, which states their menu of the day, or any house specialities they have on offer. If everything is written in Italian, you can almost be sure you are in safe hands. So I ordered a simple tuna fish salads with mozzarella cheese, tomatoes and hard-boiled eggs. The salad looks so simple, but everything was really delicious. Sometimes I asked myself: why is it in Italy and Spain that coffee and salads taste so much better than elsewhere? No matter where you go, you can always find delicious salads for less than 6 euros and great coffee for less than 1.50 euros. If there are nice little places like this, who needs Starbucks?
And it is no coincidence that in both Spain and Italy, where delicious healthy food can be had at almost every turn of the corner, the propensity to come across good-looking men and women is also much higher than in North America and the UK. So here it goes: healthy-eating makes you look better, no need for crash diet or plastic surgery.


Copyrights@2010. All text and photos by YC Cheng. All Rights Reserved.