Coffee, Eggs, and a Notebook: Patti Smith’s Everyday Gastronomy

First published in FNL-Guide in May 2025

With hair that’s never met conditioner, a stare that says “I don’t care if your steak’s medium rare,” and eating habits that would never make it past the doors of most fine dining restaurants, the punk high priestess seems, at first glance, entirely out of place in FNL. Or is she?

Because if anyone ever turned cheap coffee and a dried-out toast into an entire aesthetic, and did so with poetry, it was Patti Smith. I’m not sure she can pronounce prosciutto correctly, or if she’s ever ordered an amuse-bouche, but she knows better than anyone that kitchens serve memories.

Some go to Dante, the all-day bar in Greenwich Village once ranked among the best in the world, for its Negroni. Patti went for scrambled eggs. Others flocked to Café Ino, the tiny Bedford Street café that closed in 2013, barely fitting twenty people, to catch a glimpse of someone famous or, more often, to seem interesting themselves. Patti sat there to write, almost always in the same corner, with the same coffee, often accompanied by bread, butter, and honey.

She didn’t photograph her food for likes. As she writes in M Train, she did it to remember, where she was, what she felt, and what she carried that day. She still remembers. On the day her husband, Fred “Sonic” Smith, the love of her life and former guitarist of MC5, passed away, she ate a slice of bread with butter and honey. Their last meal together, and perhaps one of the simplest, most powerful rituals of memory ever written with so few ingredients.

Patti Smith was never what you’d call a “good cook,” nor did she ever try to become one. But she’s always had a pragmatic relationship with food — born of necessity. In Just Kids, her autobiographical book chronicling life with Robert Mapplethorpe in the late ’60s and early ’70s, she describes how the only things they could cook in their Chelsea Hotel room were boiled eggs in communal pots and canned soup.

Back then, the word “meal” meant two things: what you could buy with a handful of coins, and what could fill you without requiring a proper kitchen. For months, she lived almost entirely on bread, peanut butter, and bananas, unless some kind of soup happened to be on sale. Every so often, when she could afford it, she’d buy a cheeseburger from a local diner. That was her idea of a gastronomic triumph. In many interviews, when asked about food, her answer is always the same, brief, and unpretentious: “I like to eat simply.” On The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, she said that a plain burger with fries remains, even today, “the most honest dinner one can have in New York.”

From Greenwich Village to the other side of the world, Patti eats the same way, simply, repetitively, ritualistically. When she travels, she doesn’t seek the city’s best restaurants; she seeks the familiar within the unknown. That’s why Tokyo didn’t captivate her for its cuisine as a cultural phenomenon, but because she found a small ramen shop where she returned every day, ordering the same bowl, at the same table, while she wrote. The restaurant had no fame, but she loved it because it was warm, quiet, and perfectly suited to her solitude.

Berlin was a different story. There, food became a struggle. She describes meals she barely remembered — or wished she could forget. It was a period of creative searching, but the flavors didn’t align with her sense of self. The cuisine felt foreign, distant, without comfort. In her books, she recalls how meals became an obstacle to daily life. The only place where she finds true culinary peace is New York. Often, upon returning, the first thing she does is eat a hot dog on the street — not as a statement of urban nostalgia, but as an act of grounding. It’s her way of feeling, simply, that she’s home.

One of Patti’s most constant habits is her dependence on coffee. Not with the performative obsession of modern coffee culture, cold brews, filters, and tasting notes, but with the sincerity of someone who needs two things to function: a cup of coffee and a notebook. She’s written entire passages about her ritual of buying coffee to go and drinking it on the street with a single cookie. During one of her visits to Athens, she mentioned that the best coffee she ever had was in a small café in Pangrati, served by an elderly woman with a piece of homemade cake, the kind her mother used to make. She never mentioned the café’s name, and I doubt she remembered it. What mattered to her was that the memory tied itself to hospitality and simplicity, things Patti seems to value far more than any culinary achievement.

When asked in an interview whether she’d prefer a fine dining dinner or a fast-food burger with friends on a park bench, she didn’t hesitate for a second: “Burger, no question. As long as I have napkins, and good conversation.”

Perhaps the most touching record of Patti Smith’s relationship with food comes in a single paragraph from M Train. It’s Christmas. She’s alone in New York. With little enthusiasm, she walks into a diner and orders a cup of coffee and an egg sandwich. It’s served on a large plate with potatoes and lettuce leaves, “as if they’d put all their care into it,” she writes. She makes no comment on how it tasted. What moves her is the detail, the simple fact that someone, that night, had taken the trouble to make something beautiful out of very little.

And that’s how Patti Smith understands food, not as a vehicle of prestige or technical perfection, but as an act of care.