Despite all the tea in China, in Shanghai, the coffee is hot
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On the streets of downtown Shanghai, a caffeine-fuelled revolution has taken place over the past decade or so, surprising first-time visitors who expect to find the city awash with, well, tea.
Let’s not exaggerate. Coffee poses no immediate threat to China’s 2000-year-old tea-drinking culture, but its consumption is steadily becoming a fixture of middle-class routines.
The average person in China drank 16.7 cups of coffee in 2023, a mighty increase on the nine cups of 2016 – but scarcely in the realm of the one-a-day (or more!) habit of most Australians.
Maggie Li, 27, pours a flat white at Cafe del Volcan in Shanghai.Credit: Sanghee Liu
These days, there are an estimated 400 million coffee drinkers across China driving what is now a $56 billion-a-year and growing industry, according to university research and government figures.
Nowhere is coffee more popular in China than in Shanghai, the country’s financial and cosmopolitan hub.
The city lays claim to having the most coffee shops in the world – 9553 to be exact, according to figures regularly cited by local officials. A good slice of these would be chain stores, but Shanghai has a pumping homegrown coffee culture too.
The vibrant, experimental heart of the city’s coffee scene is in the trendy former French concession district, where hundreds of independent cafes compete with vintage shops, boutiques, and cocktail bars for real estate in charming colonial buildings and converted old homes.
It’s a bourgeois-chic coffee culture that wouldn’t be out of place, in both aesthetic and quality, in Melbourne or Sydney’s inner suburbs.
Of course, where there is good coffee there is the flat white. Perhaps Australia’s most successful food export, it has been transported by Aussie expats to cafes across the globe with such gusto that it now appears organically, under its own milk steam, on menus in far-flung places.
Yet, I was still surprised by its ubiquity in Shanghai. In China, by the way, there’s no doubting the flat white’s origins. The Kiwis’ spurious claims to having invented it have no truck here.
“Ao bai”, as a flat white is called in Mandarin, is composed of two Chinese characters meaning “Australia” and “white”.
“A long time ago, when it started to become popular, everyone would know it as a coffee from Sydney or Melbourne,” says Maggie Li, 27, a barista at the expat-owned Cafe del Volcan. The cafe was one of the early arrivals on Shanghai’s coffee scene more than a decade ago and is renowned for roasting its own beans.
Maggie Gu, 30, owner of Pushing Coffee, a hole-in-the-wall style cafe where customers drop off their dogs for the day.Credit: Sanghee Liu
Now the flat white is so common no one gives it a second thought, Li says.
“You can find it at every coffee shop,” she says.
Some of us watched in alarm as the price of a takeaway coffee smashed past $5 in Australia, but in Shanghai, at the fancier places, it can cost more than $8. This can make it more expensive to get coffee than to have lunch.
By comparison, at Luckin Coffee, China’s answer to Starbucks, a standard latte will set you back about 19 yuan ($4).
A few blocks away, a corgi stands sentinel in the open window of Pushing Cafe, sometimes joined on the sill by three or four pooch friends of varying sizes and breeds.
Barely more than a hole-in-the-wall, the cafe doubles as an unofficial doggy daycare where owners deposit their pets on the way to work. The dogs socialise while owner Maggie Gu works the coffee grinder and steams milk. Ginger and Osmanthus lattes are Gu’s specialty, but the drawcard is Gu herself.
A group of customers at Cofe+ take pictures in front of the coffee-making robot booth on Nanjing Road, the busiest shopping street in Shanghai.Credit: Sanghee Liu
A big, garrulous personality, she can be heard before she’s seen – usually in uproarious conversation with her cast of regulars who crowd the footpath, perched on stools and crates a whisker from the main road where taxis fly past.
“I feel Shanghai coffee culture was more rich 10 years ago, compared to today. It was a better environment for the exchange of ideas and studying techniques. Now, it has become more utilitarian,” she says.
It wouldn’t be a hipster cafe scene if the original trailblazers weren’t bemoaning the popularisation of their craft and the entry of newcomers with deeper pockets and expansion plans. But on the utilitarian claim she may have a point.
A short drive away in the famous Nanjing Road shopping strip, a new robot coffee cube called Cofe+ is churning out barista-free iced Americanos and hot cappuccinos for 9 yuan ($1.91). It claims to be the first of its kind and is a tourist drawcard. A robotic arm fetches an ice-filled cup, into which the machine shoots hot coffee and cold milk, before sealing it and delivering it via a chute to the customer.
A disconcerting glimpse into a rapidly encroaching automated future – and perfect if you prefer your coffee experience to be soulless. For me, I’ll take people and dogs any day.
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