Shek Wu Hui is a bustling old market town, an old-fashioned kind of place where goods of all kinds spill out from vintage walkup buildings: lively but far from trendy. It’s certainly not the kind of place where you’d expect to find specialty coffee.
And yet, there it is, in a white-walled shop with local art on the walls, French electropop group playing on the stereo and a crowd of twentysomething regulars chatting with the barista as he pulls shots of espresso from a Marzocco machine. When Let It Be opened in 2022, it was the only specialty coffee shop in the far northern reaches of Hong Kong, next to the border with mainland China. Now it’s one of several.
“I grew up in Sheung Shui, but there were no coffee shops nearby,” says the café’s owner, Dannis Yeung. He first became interested in coffee at the age of 19 when he was drawn to the refined aesthetic of so-called third wave cafés, which serve specialty coffee — the highest grade of bean — sourced from specific regions or individual farms, and roasted in small batches to bring out the bean’s unique terroir. “The barista would tell me the coffee tastes like orange blossoms or something like that, and I wouldn’t know how to taste it,” he recalls. “But I liked the atmosphere. So I just kept trying.” Eventually he came to love the drink as much as the ambiance. “These days I like coffee that tastes juicy but has a clean mouthfeel,” he explains.
Yeung is only 24 – too young to remember the days when it was a struggle to find a passable cup of coffee in Hong Kong. Now it’s a city where latte art is de rigueur, coffee drinkers expect a choice of single-origin beans when they order their brew and local baristas regularly compete — and win — in international competitions. “Coffee is actually quite good in Hong Kong,” says Yeung. “I think the quality here is above average compared to most other parts of the world. It’s because of the character of Hong Kong people. They are very jim1 zim1 (淹尖, choosy). They want the best.”
That sentiment is echoed by others in the coffee industry. “Hongkongers are willing to invest in their passions,” says John So, founder and former owner of 18 Grams, one of the city’s first specialty coffee roasters. “Equipment, beans, training – they’re willing to pay for it.”
None of this was preordained. Many parts of the world have a deeply ingrained coffee culture: Italy with its espresso bars, Vietnam with its bracing slow-drip made from local robusta beans, Japan with its nostalgic kissaten. But tea was always the drink of choice in Hong Kong. When coffee was available, it was often the instant variety. That began to change with the rise of American-style coffee shops like Pacific Coffee in the 1990s, and especially with the arrival of global behemoth Starbucks, which opened its first location in Exchange Square in 2000.
Independent cafés followed, training a new generation of baristas in the art of making good espresso and silky microfoam. Then came the local roasters. “We were importing our coffee via Taiwan, but one day we realised that if we want to have the best coffee, we had to go to the origin,” says Lok Chan, who opened Craft Coffee Roaster in 2013. “Roasting is not magic. If the green beans aren’t good, we can’t make them any better.”
Craft’s first café, a tiny space in Tai Kok Tsui, was joined by an even more intimate location in Wan Chai in 2022. Customers are drawn to the tight quarters by coffee that Chan sources directly from farmers in Ethiopia and Latin America. (He visits the farms in Ethiopia at least once a year and says he is learning to appreciate kitfo, a quintessential dish of raw minced beef, but he still isn’t a fan of injera, the fermented pancake served with every meal.) “Compared to when we first opened, Hong Kong customers are more willing to learn about the background of the coffee beans and their processing,” says Chan. “They’re open minded.”
That expanding interest has coincided with a remarkable growth in Hong Kong’s specialty coffee market. Pioneering specialty cafés like Coco Espresso, 18 Grams, Colour Brown, Urban Coffee Roaster, Cupping Room and Sensory Zero have expanded to multiple locations. Tiny cafés and micro-roasters have cropped up in almost every corner of the city. For every see-and-be-seen coffee shop in a trendy neighbourhood like Sheung Wan, there’s a takeaway stall like Cold Brew Factory in Tai Kok Tsui or a neighbourhood roaster like Hobbit in Sham Shui Po. There’s even a specialty coffee stand in the middle of Chai Wan Park called Zero to One.
Many of these new shops are the product of the Covid-19 pandemic, during the first two years of which an estimated 400 new coffee shops opened across Hong Kong – an astonishing boom fed by people looking for nice places to go and fun things to do at a time when the border was closed. The bubble has burst, but not without leaving a trace. Even if many of the pandemic-era cafés have closed, “there are a lot more people interested in coffee now,” says So, who sold 18 Grams during the Covid boom.
Wilson Chung agrees. A former 18 Grams barista who is now the co-owner of Chart Coffee, which has cafés in Central and Kwai Chung and a roastery in the New Territories, he has seen the city’s evolution into a hub for good brews. “Hong Kong started from a tea culture and many people might have found coffee too strong tasting in the past,” he says. But many types of specialty coffee tend to be floral or fruity in taste. “If it’s light roasted, it’s more to their taste. It’s more tea-like.”
Chung credits the local competition culture with keeping quality high. There are several local competitions organised by groups like the Hong Kong Professional Coffee Association and the Hong Kong Specialty Coffee Association. Chung himself won a siphon brewing competition in 2019 and ranked as a runner-up in the Hong Kong Brewers’ Cup, Latte Art Championship and Barista Championship. The winners of local coffee competitions often go on to compete globally; Cupping Room barista Penny Pang placed 11th at the last World Barista Championship.
“I’m scared of the competitions,” admits Dannis Yeung with a laugh. As a self-taught barista, he feels like he’s still finding his footing. And that’s partly the philosophy behind Let It Be, whose name reflects Yeung’s ambition to create a café that serves good coffee — not the best, but definitely good — while also functioning as a casual neighbourhood gathering space.
When he opened the café three years ago, Yeung was still a Baptist University communications student, running the shop while following online courses. (Classrooms were shut due to Covid restrictions.) He displays art by Sheung Shui residents on the walls; one recent exhibition showcased stories on the theme of failure.
“I like creating an environment where people can gather,” he says. “At the beginning, it was more teenagers. They already had the habit of getting coffee and trying new places in Kowloon and Hong Kong Island.” But now the clientele is more varied, with plenty of older customers, too. “People like being able to get specialty coffee close to home,” he says.
After weathering the intense competition of the Covid years and seeing many of the new cafés shut down, many people in the coffee industry are wary of what’s to come. “Hong Kong is a very tough place to do business,” says So. Chan agrees: even though Hong Kong’s lack of import duties mean green coffee is cheaper to buy here than in most countries, rent and operational costs remain high, and the price of a cup of specialty coffee is usually between HK$30 and $60. With Hong Kong still struggling with a weak economy, they worry that customers will look for a more affordable caffeine fix.
But Yeung says his business is going well. So well, in fact, that he recently opened a second location in the newly revived Luen Wo Hui Market, in Fanling, about 30 minutes by foot from the original shop. As in Shek Wu Hui, he already has a loyal base of customers. Why do they keep coming back to specialty coffee? “They can taste the difference,” he says.