The coffeehouse began with Sufi monks in 15th century Yemen, who drank coffee to stay awake through all night dhikr chanting. The Arabic word kahwa had originally referred to a type of wine. In 1555 two merchants from Aleppo and Damascus opened a shop in Istanbul’s Tahtakale district, and Ottoman coffeehouses soon filled with chess, backgammon, storytellers, and open political debate. Authorities in Mecca had already tried to ban coffeehouses in 1511, and the bans did not hold.

England’s first coffeehouse opened in Oxford around 1650, run by a Jewish entrepreneur named Jacob, and Pasqua Rosée opened London’s first in 1652. For a penny, anyone could read the news and argue with anyone else, and Edward Lloyd’s shop grew into Lloyd’s of London while New Jonathan’s became the Stock Exchange in 1773. Vienna built a culture of lingering, and Paris’s Café Procope, opened in 1689, set the look of mirrors and marble. Women were barred as customers in England and France, and the story runs through Greenwich Village folk clubs and Alfred Peet’s Berkeley shop to Luckin Coffee’s app driven stores in China.

• King Charles II tried to suppress coffeehouses as places where disaffected persons spread scandal about the Crown, and Londoners ignored him.
• Vienna’s coffee culture was formalized in 1685 by Armenian merchant Johannes Diodato, not by beans left behind after the 1683 siege.
• Procopio Cutò furnished the Procope with mirrors and marble tables taken from a bathhouse.
• Mathematician Émilie du Châtelet dressed in men’s clothes to get into Café Gradot in Paris.
• Founded in Beijing in 2017, Luckin had passed 20,000 stores in China by 2024, overtaking Starbucks there.