Attention all Greeks! All friends of Greeks! All people who’ve ever visited Greece! All residents of Astoria and Melbourne! All Manhattan- and Brooklynites who don’t really get what’s so cool about Queens! Hell, just anyone who really likes coffee!

This new book, Frappe Nation, by Vivian Constantinopoulos and Daniel Young, is truly wonderful.

But first, for all the people who fall into that last two categories, allow me to explain what a frappe is.

It’s simply the most genius coffee drink ever. It involves powdered Nescafe, cold water and ice. If you happen to like sugar or milk, you can have that too. You shake the bejesus out of the Nescafe and the cold water (and maybe sugar), till you get this beautiful velvety beige foam, then you pour it over ice. Then you add a little more water, or milk if you like. Then you sip and sip and sip. (Or, if you’re like me and have poor straw-management skills, you slurp too fast and have heart palpitations.) It kicks the ass of your standard iced coffee, because the sugar is blended in, and it lasts a lot longer. If you’re shuddering at the thought of instant coffee, get over it. It works perfectly.

I act as though I was born to frappe-ness, but of course I didn’t learn about it till relatively late in life. I’m sure it was Peter who first made me a frappe, and I can’t remember if it was before or after I moved to Astoria. You’d think I’d recall that formative moment, but I suppose it changed my life so irrevocably that I can’t remember what it was like pre-frappe.

But about the book: It’s a pretty, glossy bilingual coffee-table book. And rare for coffee-table books, the text is actually worth reading–it’s the best kind of food-writing, in which some foodstuff is analyzed and refracted back on the culture that produced it, so that you don’t have to be a frappe drinker (yet) to appreciate what this coffee concoction represents to a whole country.

In the book, you learn about Greek kids secretly making frappes in their bedrooms, and about the early Nescafe campaigns promoting it. You learn about Greek coffee culture in general, and you get some recipes and strategies. Ferran Adria, that master of foam, is name-checked by a Greek chef! You hear the ad-man who promoted Turkish coffee as Greek coffee in the 1970s admitting that, really, the frappe is the true “Greek coffee.”

And the photos are great, particularly because they counterbalance the common depictions of Greece as a land of black-shrouded, wizened, toothless women, bleary-eyed old men in a perpetual state of backgammon-ness, and goats. Who would’ve known: young, cool people live in Greece! They’re hot, they’re sexy! They’re even vaguely “European”-looking! And they all drink frappes.

If a ticket to Greece or even the book is out of your reach financially, you can still visit the authors’ website, Frappe Nation, for recipes, general info and even cute “Frappe Nation” tank tops (I happen to own one myself).

Or you can just come out to Astoria and sample one yourself: see Alpha Astoria for ratings on the best of the cafes. I know it’s a little cold for a frappe now–I guess you can wait. But I’ll remind you when the springtime comes.