Café Crème

In a French café or brasserie, a café crème – often just un crème – is an espresso topped up with hot steamed milk and a little foam, served in a cup. Despite the name, it is made with milk, not cream. It is the closest thing on a French menu to a latte, with less foam than a cappuccino; in the north of France it is often made a little longer with more water, while in the south, under Italian influence, it tends to be shorter and stronger.

Ask for a grand crème and you’ll get a bigger cup, often made with a double shot. Many people use the terms café crème and café au lait interchangeably; strictly, café au lait is the home-style, very milky breakfast coffee once drunk from a bowl, while the café crème is the espresso-machine drink served in cafés.

It is mainly a morning drink, ideal with a croissant on a café terrace. After lunch the French usually switch to a plain espresso (un café) or a noisette, an espresso with just a dash of milk.

Coffee with milk is a long-standing French breakfast habit, traditionally as the café au lait drunk at home from a large bowl. The café crème is its café counterpart, made with an espresso machine, and is today one of the standard coffees on every French café and brasserie menu.

The name has a tangled history. In Italy, “caffè crema” was an early name for espresso itself – Gaggia used it in 1948 for its new crema-topped coffee – and from the 1980s it came to mean a long espresso in Switzerland, Germany and Austria. In France, though, café crème has kept its own meaning: espresso with hot milk. Its exact origin as a French menu term is not well documented.