“Let the coffee talk to you,” she says. And more importantly, don’t be surprised if your coffee speaks to you differently than it speaks to someone else—a tip she learned from her mother, who also read coffee grounds. But her mother didn’t give her lessons, per se. “It’s not something she could teach. She talked about it and I said, ‘How do I do it?’” Bal says. “She goes, ‘Just look at the images and feel the images.’ Because what she sees and what I would see? Totally different. It doesn’t mean that she’s wrong or I’m wrong, just that we’re getting different signs.”
Read More
September in many ways is synonymous with change...
Read More
Picture having a coffee and gossip date with all your besties and then sprinkle in some knowledge about your future and that’s what you get when you sit for a reading with Turkish Coffee Messenger Sema Bal. Armed with her own personal blend of Turkish coffee in hand, Bal interprets the dregs of your coffee to read your past, present and future. The art of reading coffee has been in her family for generations and she, herself, has been doing this for over 30 years.
Read More
Watch Sema on Vice's Munchies: How to Make and Read Turkish Coffee
Read More
Is my boyfriend doomed to die in a motorcycle crash? Am I destined to develop early onset dementia? Is someone in my family secretly suffering from an undiagnosed terminal illness? If so, do I even want to know?
Taking Your Passions Further
Ad by Citibank US
These are the questions rattling my brain on Saturday, November 26th as I travel from Manhattan to Queens to meet Sema Bal, the Turkish coffee reader known for accurately predicting future events in the lives of three cast members of The Real Housewives of New York.
The art of reading coffee cups has been practiced for centuries across the Middle East and many Balkan countries. Rooted in a combination of intuition and the translation of symbols, the process is relatively straightforward. Basically, you schedule an appointment with your local gifted coffee guru (an hour-long session with Sema costs $200), drink the highly caffeinated, muddy coffee she prepares for you, place your saucer atop your cup, swirl the little dish about, and then anxiously await the interpretation of any symbols that appear in the moist grounds left behind.
Read More
Have a question or wish in mind at the beginning
Sema Bal asks that you think of a wish as you're sipping the coffee. When flipping the coffee cup onto the saucer, you'll hold the two together and turn the cup either clockwise or counterclockwise as you ask the question or make the wish. If you don't know what to ask, let your mind drift and somehow lead you to the right subject.
Read More
Tapping into your future can be as simple as peeking into your leftover cup of joe, at least if you stop by New York’s most famous coffee fortune teller from Queens.
Sema Bal, a Turkish expat who moved to New York by way of Australia more than 20 years ago, made her first debut on television last year after being featured on the Bravo’s infamous “Real Housewives of New York.”
Since then, the gifted psychic has not only been visited by numerous clients from surrounding states, but has also been approached by major TV execs in hopes of launching a reality show.
“[Producers] approached me, but they wanted to include my kids,” Bal said. “But I don’t want to get my kids involved.”
Read More