Our guide to coffee around the world is a selective guide to the best coffee destinations for coffee loving travellers who prioritise packing an Aeropress over a cocktail shaker, mark cafes on maps before museums and restaurants, sign up for coffee tours before cooking classes, prefer to drink an espresso standing up at an Italian cafe-bar than linger over cafe au lait on a Paris square, and take home bags of beans over snow domes and fridge magnets.
I have to confess: when we used to travel the world as a globetrotting travel-food writer and photographer team, we packed both a moka stove-top espresso maker and a cocktail shaker. I carried the former, Terence the latter — along with a cleaver and other kitchen utensils. My Aeropress is already packed away in my Samsonite for my trip back home to Siem Reap.
My collection of coffee mementoes from around the world includes an engraved Arabic dallah coffee pot from Dubai, where we lived for years, a little Turkish brass cezve coffee brewer with long handle from Istanbul, and a Vietnamese phin coffee filter brewer from our first trip to Saigon — although bags of coffee beans are my favourite souvenir.
I’m sharing this guide to coffee around the world for International Coffee Day on October 1st. It’s our very selective guide to the world’s best coffee destinations for coffee lovers, places to go where you’re guaranteed to get a great cup of coffee, experience a thriving cafe culture, and the coffee beverages to order.
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Coffee Around the World — Coffee Lovers Guide to Where to Go and What to Order
This guide to coffee around the world is by no means comprehensive. It’s a selective guide to our picks of the world’s best places to go for coffee lovers, and the cafes and coffee shops you have to go, and the coffee beverages to order.
Cafes are also a great place to meet locals when you travel, and these places are also fantastic for the local coffee culture and coffee rituals, which are just as important as being able to get a great cup of coffee, whatever shape, form or flavour it comes in.
Australia
Australians take their coffee seriously, which means it’s easy to find great coffee, making Australia one of the world’s best coffee destination for coffee lovers. You’ll find good coffee in nearly every Australian city and town, but Sydney and Melbourne are Australia’s coffee capitals. Melbourne prides itself on being home to Australia’s oldest cafe culture and the first Australian city to install a steam-operated Italian espresso machine at Italian café Florentino in 1928.
Although it was Greek brothers in Sydney who started Australia’s first coffee roastery in 1910 and another Greek who installed the first lever-operated espresso machine at his two Sydney milk bars*, called Patricia’s, in 1948 and 1949. Bar Italia opened in 1952 in Leichhardt, Sydney’s Little Italy, and is still going strong, as is iconic cafe Pellegrini’s, Melbourne’s first stand-up espresso bar, installed Melbourne first lever-style machine in 1954.
When I was eighteen I worked as a barista in a Sydney espresso bar cum chocolate shop, to put myself through university. The owners imported chocolates and coffee beans from Italy, which we ground before making each coffee, and the customers were mostly Italian-Australian owner-managers of high-end boutiques in the posh Queen Victoria Building.
They placed very particular orders for their morning macchiatos, lunchtime lattes and afternoon cappuccinos, and rolled their eyes if the crema on their macs was too high, if there was too much milk in their lattes, and, heaven forbid, if I forgot and shook cocoa over their froth. Australians of Italian heritage did not sprinkle chocolate on their coffee, I was repeatedly reminded. But it was the best coffee education.
There are thousands of great cafes in Sydney and Melbourne. In Sydney, try Piña in Potts Point, our former home of many years; the original Bills in Darlinghurst, which opened in 1993, for the late Bill Granger’s quintessentially Aussie breakfasts; Reuben Hills, a coffee institution in Surry Hills; and The Grounds of Alexandria in Alexandria. In Melbourne, try Hardware Societe in the CBD, the original St Ali in South Melbourne, Seven Seeds in Carlton, and Proud Mary in Collingwood. Check websites such as Broadsheet and Time Out for more tips.
While the rising price of a cup of coffee as an indicator of inflation is often discussed on breakfast television in Australia, Aussies would sooner sacrifice an evening beer at the pub over a chai latte from their favourite cafe. But Aussies also make proper coffee at home. Supermarkets sell espresso makers and stock a wide range of beans and ground coffee. A tip for travellers to Australia: pack an Aeropress so you can sample them for yourself.
Australians’ taste in coffee has diversified. Our generation might prefer to kickstart their day with a heady short black with a smudge of milk and leave the lattes and milky flat whites until the afternoon, while younger coffee aficionados sip lighter, fruitier pour-overs and cold brews in cafes that offer coffee cuppings, bean subscriptions and coconut sugar.
Then there are the popular Asian spots selling hybrid coffee-tea beverages. The specialty at a Pinoy laneway coffee van here in Bendigo, Australia’s only UNESCO City of Gastronomy, is Kondensada or Spanish Latte made with Kapeng Barako or Coffea liberica beans. Another nearby Chinese hole-in-the-wall gets busy with everyone from public servants to school kids lining up for rainbow-coloured coffee-tea beverages in big plastic cups. Now it’s my turn to roll my eyes.
Italy
If your favourite type of coffee is an espresso or macchiato and you have an espresso maker in the kitchen, then Northern Italy, birthplace of the espresso machine, should top your list of coffee destinations. While the first steam-pressured espresso machine that forced boiling water through coffee grounds was invented in Turin in 1884 by Angelo Moriondo, it was in Milan in 1901 that Luigi Bezzera produced an espresso machine closer to what we all use today.
Coffee is great all over Italy. Just as it’s hard to get a bad bowl of pasta in Italy, it’s close to impossible to be served bad coffee, which is more than can be said about many cities in the world. But while the coffee is generally fantastic in Turin and Milan, some of the most atmospheric cafes for downing espressos are the historic cafe-bars in Rome, many of which still have the same pre- or post-war decor they had when they opened.
One of the best cafes in Rome is Caffè Sant Eustachio, on Piazza Sant’Eustachio near the Pantheon, which dates to 1938, and is owned by the Ricci brothers, descendants of the original owner. The brothers import their 100% Arabica coffee from ethical coffee cooperatives in South America and roast their own beans in an old-fashioned wood-burning coffee roaster. Always busy, for many Romans this is where to find the best coffee in Rome.
That explains why there’s always a huddle around the counter and a long line of customers, which typically includes a mix of local workers, neighbourhood business owners, politicians from the nearby senate, and coffee-loving tourists. The owners are proud of their famous patrons who have included everyone from world leaders such as John F Kennedy to iconic movie stars like Catherine Deneuve.
At Caffè Sant Eustachio, order the gran caffè, a creamy sweetened double espresso, perfected to local taste, so it needs no more sugar or milk. It’s designed to be downed quickly, as espresso is meant to be drank. Italians also drink an espresso standing up at the bar. One of the biggest mistakes of first-time travellers to Italy is to settle in at a cafe table (where the prices are higher) and only order an espresso. Tables are meant for lingering over more than coffee.
For a sit-down cafe, try beautiful Bar della Pace, formerly Antico Caffè della Pace, dating to 1891, long a haunt of poets, intellectuals, actors, photographers. When we stumbled upon it on our first trip to Rome over 25 years ago, it was a busy cafe in the morning, full of regulars who knew each other; was popular with hot, tired tourists in the late afternoon; and in the evenings was buzzy with Romans sipping cocktails after work at the candlelit tables. It reopened last year after a painstaking restoration and is also a restaurant now.
For gelato with your espresso, which is a very Roman combination, head to Piazza di Montecitoria and nearby Giolitti for Rome’s most famous and finest gelato (we recommend the classics like nocciola and cioccolato) or a granita di caffè (a cooling coffee with crushed ice, which is refreshing in summer. Not old, but try Roscioli Caffè Pasticceria near Campo de Fiori for the pastries as much as the coffee, especially if you can’t get a table at the family’s massively popular Salumeria Roscioli, famed for its classic Roman pastas and scrumptious products.
Vietnam
The second largest coffee exporter after Brazil, Southeast Asia’s Vietnam is one of the best destinations for coffee lovers — whether you’re into the lighter, fruitier pour-over coffees brewed from fair trade, single origin Arabica that are the specialty of the more contemporary hipster cafes in Saigon that are popular these days, or you’re a fan of the headier traditional-style coffees made from Vietnamese robusta beans that you’ll find all over Vietnam.
It was the French Jesuits who introduced coffee to Vietnam during the colonial period in the 1870s, establishing coffee plantations on the cool slopes surrounding the charming hill station of Dalat in Vietnam’s Central Highlands. Although Vietnam has a reputation for only growing robusta beans, Arabic was also planted around Dalat over 150 years ago.
Dalat is Vietnam’s coffee capital and is the place to head if you’re a coffee connoisseur. You can do a Dalat coffee tour at K’Ho Coffee in Langbiang village, home to the K’Ho ethnic minority peoples, where, after a stroll through the coffee garden where coffee cherries grow on the trees, you can do a tasting of their 100% Arabica at their alfresco café overlooking the mountains. Don’t leave without buying some beans.
Or tour La Viet’s coffee farm to learn how coffee is planted and harvested, how coffee beans are graded and processed, or visit La Viet’s roasting facility and retail outlet for a behind-the-scenes coffee roasting and sorting tour, where you can also shop their wonderful little boutique for coffee, coffee makers and accessories. See our one day Dalat itinerary which includes our Dalat accommodation tips and our post on Dalat’s best street food tour.
You can join the locals on footpaths in cities and towns across Vietnam to sip icy-cold coffee called cà phê đá or ‘coffee ice’ when served black or cà phê sữa đá when it comes with condensed milk. While you’ll find stylish cafes and sleek franchises in Saigon and Hanoi, we love Hanoi’s historic cafes, hidden away in heritage buildings, up stairs, on rooftops, and in basements. Look for a line of locals. These are the spots to savour Vietnamese coffees with egg, yogurt, or coconut cream.
Singapore and Malaysia
Not surprisingly, you’ll find contemporary cafes in Kuala Lumpur and Singapore as cool as any in Sydney and Saigon, with baristas in long black aprons preparing pour-overs at set-ups reminiscent of high school chemistry labs. When you spot the smashed avocado on menus, you’d be forgiven for thinking you’re in Australia — if you weren’t aware of how far and wide avo toast has travelled.
Which is why, for us, the best coffee experiences are not at those kind of sleek cafes you’ll stumble upon in cities all over the world, but at the more atmospheric traditional coffee houses called kopitiams in Singapore and Malaysia, where the caffeinated beverage to order is ‘kopi’ or coffee.
Of Malay-Hokkien origin, kopi is a smooth syrupy coffee, traditionally brewed with a little butter in the kopi pot. The most popular kopi is with sweetened condensed milk. To order, simply ask for ‘kopi’; with evaporated milk, it’s ‘kopi c’; with ice, ‘kopi peng’ or ‘kopi c peng’ (‘peng’ is ‘iced’). For sweet hot black coffee, it’s ‘kopi o’ (‘o’ is black); with ice, ‘kopi o peng’; hot black coffee without sugar is ‘kopi o kosong’ (‘kosong’ is zero); with ice no sugar, ‘kopi oh kosong peng’; with evaporated milk no sugar, ‘kopi c kosong’.
But the kopi experience isn’t all about the coffee as much as the chance to participate in the local ritual of sipping kopi while munching on crunchy kaya toast — one of those matches made in food heaven or wherever the best flavour pairings are coupled.
Kaya is a sweet, creamy coconut jam made from coconut, sugar, eggs, and pandan (it will be greenish colour) or palm sugar (brownish). Kaya is spread over thick slabs of butter (or margarine) sandwiched between two toast slices. We’ve got a kaya coconut jam recipe here.
Traditionally toasted over fire at the best kopitiams, the toasted bread has a smokiness about it, and can often be over-dry and crispy — which we reckon is just an excuse (reason?) for all that butter and creamy kaya spread. See our guide to breakfast in Singapore for the best kopitiams for sampling kopi and kayo toast.
