Pumpkin Spice Lattes, a Favorite U.S. Fall Drink, Divide Europe

As soon as autumn weather arrives, customers at Have a Roll bakeries in Belgium begin to ask the baristas: Is it pumpkin spice latte season yet?

“It’s getting more popular every year,” said Dennis Van Peel, the chain’s owner, who puts the drink on the menu at his cafes in Antwerp, Brussels and other cities starting in October. He has begun to serve the beverage by request even earlier.

But, he admits, “either you love it or you hate it.”

Since pumpkin spice lattes were first added to Starbucks’s American menus in 2003, they have become a fall mainstay in the United States, where versions are regularly sold in smaller independent coffee shops. Inspired by the success of the latte, pumpkin spice coffee creamers, candles, lip glosses and even hummus begin to pop up in stores starting from late summer, long before the first leaves turn color and the summer sun fades.

Yet in Europe, the birthplace of the espresso, where coffee culture stretches back nearly a half-millennium and American culinary creations are viewed with frequent suspicion and occasional contempt, the flavored lattes are divisive.

“In Brussels, you can find some coffee shops that are against it — it is too much of a trend,” said Thomas Wyngaard, the founder of OK Coffee, which organizes coffee tours through Brussels.

Mr. Wyngaard said he was not a fan in general, but was open to European pumpkin spice lattes that manage to “re-appropriate the recipe and bring it to another level.”

Pumpkin spice lattes are, in many ways, globalization in a cup, the product of hundreds of years of exchange between Europe, Asia and the Americas.

Contrary to common perception, the drinks often contain no pumpkin. What is essential is a signature mix of spices that is typically found in pumpkin pie, including cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger and allspice.

Such a mix first became associated with autumn in 16th- and 17th-century Europe, food experts say. Back then, products like nutmeg were fantastically expensive, shipped to the continent from islands in Indonesia. They were used to flavor cakes and sweets mainly around religious holidays, especially Christmas.

“You start to get these spiced foods — like fruit cake, gingerbread — associated with the fall and holiday season,” said Sarah Wassberg Johnson, a food historian who runs a blog on culinary history. American settlers then used the mixture to flavor pies made from local gourds that ripened in October and November. Pumpkins are native to North America.

“You have this explosion of pie innovation in the 19th century in the United States, and pumpkin pie is one of those,” Ms. Johnson said.

By the early 20th century, American spice brands began to prepackage the array of spices used in pumpkin pies so that American housewives could save time and money. Pumpkin pie spice was born.

Starbucks began to roll out the pumpkin spice latte in Europe in 2012, when it debuted in Britain. Today, it is available in 85 of the 89 global markets where Starbucks operates, the company said.

The lattes are common at other big international chain coffee shops in Europe, but they remain rarer at independent cafes — and difficult to locate in some cities.

In Brussels, pumpkin spice lattes are increasingly widespread. One can also find them easily in Amsterdam, Warsaw and even Leipzig, Germany.

But the concoction remains far less ubiquitous in Italy, where espresso was born around the turn of the 20th century.

There is one on offer at MadamaDorè, a vegan, gluten-free and sugar-free pastry shop and bar in the far northwest reaches of Rome, but even the woman who added it to the menu seemed only mildly enthusiastic.

“I liked it in America,” explained Tiziana Rossi, the shop’s proprietor. Her Italian customers are not exactly clamoring for it.

“Every so often they drink a pumpkin spice, when I make one,” Ms. Rossi said. The coffees cost more than 9 euros (about $10.44), a steep charge in a city where cappuccinos are regularly under €3.

Justine Combeaud, the owner of Comptoir Veggie, not far from Gare de Lyon, offers a pumpkin spice option flavored with cinnamon, cloves, nutmeg and pepper. But “people in France don’t really know what it is” and hesitate, she said.

“The French palate is going to appreciate the spices,” she said. But the lattes, like many American culinary exports, are often perceived as cloyingly sweet.

Mr. Van Peel, in Belgium, said that five years ago, he had to explain the drink to locals. These days, it is a cold-weather hit. But even at his cinnamon roll bakeries, he tones down the sugar.

His version, he said, “is sweet, but not American sweet — because that’s really sweet.”

Aurelien Breeden contributed reporting from Paris, Josephine La Bruyere from Rome, and Jim Tankersley from Berlin.