Outside, the building is still New England Puritan brick. Inside, it's North African Muslim. Bronze railings frame an angular staircase. Under the vaulted wood ceilings in the upstairs room, faux Bronze Age pottery graces the windowsills and exotic music twists around the tables.

Though Cafe Algiers is often packed with yuppies scrambling for the cramped seating and the mint tea, patrons of this newfangled shop just don't appreciate the art of a lengthy coffee break, Winer laments.

"Very few people [are there] who look like students," Winer says. "The attitude now is like, eat there, be sort of polite, have a little conversation, say goodbye."

The Garage is a neon-and-linoleum mall with a video store and a wealth of downscale eateries. It's noisy, crowded, impersonal--in short, a lot like any modern mini-mall.

But The Coffee Connection, tucked in one corner of the Dunster Street building, is not like any coffee shop. Many say it feels like one of the last real cafes. It may be the only place in the Square that lists its coffees by region.

Inside the store's cramped quarters, rich, dry aromas waft from the stack of coffee beans next to the mocha makers by the milk chocolate covered espresso beans ($12.50 per pound). The flavor of Ethiopian yirgacheffe coffee, Coffee Connection literature boasts, "suggests...floral lemon." A sip of "Yemen Mocha Mattari" suggests "spicy fruit or chocolate."

But new technology tends to dilute the atmosphere these coffees and exotic flavors help to create, and some customers say they miss the less-automated coffeemaking techniques of days gone by.

Winer recounts his frustration at watching a Coffee Connection employee search frantically for the button to make a "long" espresso.

And even the jazz music piped in between The Coffee Connection's wooden beams and extravagant displays doesn't attract the younger crowds, Fernandez says.

As any true member of the cafe cult will insist, decor alone does not create true coffee shop atmosphere. For that, you need people.

The artsy folk havens' adjustment to upscale shops with a wider appeal has changed the constituency of the customers, many say. Gone are the days when undergraduates piled into coffee shops to smoke and study en masse, when a cafe was the center of a pseudo-intellectual college student's universe.

"When it became a non-smoking place, we lost a lot of the younger people," one Coffee Connection employee recalls.

The watered-down versions of the Square's cafes have attracted more graduate students and older patrons than College students, some employees and frequenters say.

Most of the "regular" customers at The Coffee Connection now are graduate students, according to employee Alexander A. Fernandez.

Some have even gone so far as to label Harvard's cafe scene the "graduate student grotto," says Hawley G. Russell '93.