Flanders has a category of café that exists nowhere else. A koers kaffee is not a café with a bicycle theme: it is a village bar where racing is the standing subject, where the walls carry framed jerseys and somebody's grandfather's tubulars, and where once a year the whole building becomes part of the Ronde van Vlaanderen.
't Juiste Verzet sits on the lower slope of the Oude Kwaremont, where Annie has been pouring for twenty-two years and the meadow beside the terrace fills with the entire world on race day. D'Oude Hoeve is at the top of the same climb, on a street named Ronde Van Vlaanderenstraat. De Karper in Ghent is the Keisse family's brown café beside the Kuipke, which is where the Six Days goes to sit down.