The first time I sat in a third-wave cafe in Seoul, in the spring of 2018, I was charged 9,000 won (about $7) for a single-origin Ethiopian pour-over served in a porcelain cup with a separate carafe of hot water on the side. The barista had been to a tasting workshop in Melbourne the previous year. He talked about the coffee in fluent English with the kind of specific knowledge I would have expected from a senior person at Counter Culture in North Carolina. The cafe was full of Korean college students in their late teens and early twenties, almost all of them drinking similarly priced specialty coffee, almost all of them paying without flinching.
That afternoon revised my entire mental model of “Asian coffee culture.” The clichés I’d grown up with (Asia is a tea region; coffee is a Western imposition; coffee in Asia means Nescafe instant in a sachet) were 20 years out of date. Across most of Asia, coffee has gone through three waves in compressed time, and the resulting coffee landscape is now richer, more varied, and more interesting than what you’d find in most of Europe.
Here is the actual coffee landscape across Asia, region by region, with the things worth knowing if you’re traveling or just curious.
Japan: kissaten, canned, and obsessive third-wave
Japan has the longest continuous coffee culture in Asia. Coffee arrived through the Dutch trading port at Dejima in the 1600s and never really left. By the early 20th century, Tokyo and Osaka had jazz-kissa (jazz-listening cafes serving coffee) and traditional kissaten – coffee houses where a master would hand-pour single cups of slow-brewed coffee, often with a small cake, in a deeply unhurried way. Many kissaten from the 1960s and 1970s are still operating with the same fixtures, the same routines, and often the same owner-baristas.
Modern Japan layers three things on top of that tradition. First, the convenience-store coffee revolution: 7-Eleven, Lawson, and FamilyMart now sell legitimately good drip coffee for around 100-150 yen ($0.70-1.00) brewed on-demand. Second, an enormous canned coffee industry – BOSS, Georgia, UCC, Suntory – where reasonable-quality coffee in metal cans is sold from vending machines at almost every street corner. Third, an obsessive third-wave specialty scene centered in Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka, with cafes like Blue Bottle (which originally moved to Japan because Japanese coffee culture was already there) and homegrown roasters like Glitch, Onibus, and Coffee Wrights.
About half of Japan’s in-home coffee consumption is still instant. The kissaten and the third-wave cafe handle the special-occasion or quality-focused cup. The canned vending machine handles the daily mid-afternoon caffeine. Each format has its own niche.
South Korea: cafes everywhere
Seoul has more cafes per capita than any city I have ever visited. The official count puts it at over 18,000 cafes in the city, more than three times as dense as Manhattan. The walking culture, the long study sessions, the social meeting patterns: all of it routes through cafes. A small, distinctive Korean specialty scene has emerged in neighborhoods like Yeonnam-dong and Mangwon-dong, with cafes that take coffee as seriously as any in Melbourne or Portland, often combined with carefully designed interiors and Instagram-aware aesthetics.
Bigger chains like Twosome Place, A Twosome Place, Ediya, and the Korean Starbucks operation hold the everyday cafe market. The cultural posture of “going to a cafe” is closer to “going to a coworking space” in many cases. Coffee is the entry ticket for a 3-hour study session, a date, or a quiet meeting. The price reflects this: cafes are not cheap by Korean cost-of-living standards.
China: from no coffee to global third-wave in 25 years
China’s coffee market is currently the most interesting one to watch in the world. Twenty-five years ago, coffee was rare in mainland China outside of expat circles. Today, the country has more than 100,000 cafes, with the densest concentrations in Shanghai (around 9,000 cafes, more than any city outside of Tokyo) and Beijing.
Starbucks moved aggressively into China in the 2000s and now operates over 7,000 stores nationwide. But the local response has been remarkable. Luckin Coffee, founded in 2017, now operates more locations in China than Starbucks, with a mobile-ordering-first model and aggressive pricing. Manner Coffee, M Stand, Seesaw, and dozens of homegrown third-wave roasters are building genuinely good specialty operations. Shanghai’s cafe scene is now considered one of the most innovative in the world.
China also produces its own coffee now. Yunnan province in the southwest grows substantial amounts of arabica, much of it exported but increasingly served in Chinese cafes as a domestic single-origin. The quality is workmanlike at the low end and genuinely interesting at the high end – comparable to entry-level South American specialty coffees.
Vietnam: the country with its own coffee
Vietnam is the world’s second-largest coffee producer (mostly robusta) and has the most distinctive Asian coffee culture of any country. Vietnamese coffee – cà phê – is brewed through a small metal phin filter that sits on top of a glass containing sweetened condensed milk. The hot coffee drips down through the milk and you stir before drinking. Served hot in cooler weather, served over ice in summer (cà phê s?a ?á), it is one of the great regional coffee preparations.
The phin is everywhere in Vietnam: in street cafes in Hanoi and Saigon, in home kitchens, in office break rooms. The robusta-and-condensed-milk combination would not work with most arabica origins – the milk would overwhelm the bean’s flavor. With robusta, the bitter intensity holds up against the sweetness in a balanced way that nothing else replicates.
Modern Vietnamese coffee culture is layering specialty third-wave on top of this traditional base. Cafes like The Workshop in Saigon and Tranquil in Hanoi serve excellent pour-over and espresso alongside traditional phin coffee. Younger Vietnamese coffee drinkers move between formats fluidly. Egg coffee (cà phê tr?ng), invented in Hanoi in the 1940s, has become a tourist must-do; it is a real dish worth trying, regardless of its current Instagram fame.
Indonesia: producer and connoisseur
Indonesia is the fourth-largest coffee producer in the world, with Sumatra, Sulawesi, and Java each producing distinctive arabica varieties that show up on specialty menus worldwide. The “kopi tubruk” tradition – coarse-ground coffee boiled with palm sugar – is still common in homes, especially among older Indonesians. The grounds settle at the bottom of the glass; you drink the coffee above them.
In the cities of Jakarta, Yogyakarta, and Bali, a sophisticated cafe scene has built up around specialty Indonesian coffees. Roasters like Anomali Coffee and Common Grounds source their beans within Indonesia and serve them at international-level standards. The tasting-flight format (3-4 small cups of different single-origin Indonesians) is a particularly good way to experience the country’s coffee, since the regional differences within Indonesia are large.
Thailand and Southeast Asia
Northern Thailand grows surprisingly good arabica in the mountains around Chiang Rai and Chiang Mai. The Doi Chaang and Doi Tung initiatives, originally established to replace opium poppy cultivation, now produce world-class specialty coffee. The local cafe scene in Bangkok and Chiang Mai is creative and varied, with cafes like Roots, Roast, and Featherstone competing with serious specialty roasters.
Traditional Thai iced coffee (oliang) is a darker, stronger drink with corn, soybean, and sesame blended into the coffee during brewing. It’s sweet, strong, and best appreciated as a regional specialty rather than something to compare with single-origin Ethiopian.
What this all amounts to
Asia is no longer “the tea region.” Asia is, increasingly, where the most interesting things in coffee are happening – both at the consumer end (Korea, Japan, China, Vietnam) and at the producer end (Indonesia, Vietnam, Yunnan, Northern Thailand). The pace of development in places like Shanghai and Seoul has been dramatic. The traditional formats (phin, kissaten, kopi tubruk) have not been displaced but rather joined by third-wave specialty cafes operating at world-class standards.
If you travel to Tokyo or Seoul or Shanghai or Saigon expecting the coffee to be an afterthought, you’ll be missing what’s actually happening. A 2018 afternoon in that Seoul cafe ruined my old assumptions cheerfully and permanently. The barista who served me my Ethiopian pour-over had better-tasting coffee than most of the cafes I’d been into in Brooklyn that year. He charged me less for it, too.
Discussion 1
Let’s not forget Japan, Singapore, Korea and Vietnam… all countries with very evolved coffee drinking traditions.