Cafés in Latvia Riga

From chicory to the Kaza

A coffee-tasting culture grew up during Latvia's first two decades of independence after 1918, alongside elegant cafés and the production of chicory coffee.¹ The country's first coffee producer, Liepājas Kafijas fabrika, did not start until 1972.¹

Under Soviet rule a café could be a refuge. In the 1960s a small nameless café in Riga's Old Town, which everyone called Kaza (the Goat), was the meeting place of young nonconformists, hippies and beatniks. Many of them became writers, poets, musicians, directors and politicians of independent Latvia, and Laima Žurgina's 2019 documentary Kaza kāpa debesīs (The Goat Who Climbed to Heaven) gathers them back.⁷

Kafejnīca or café

Latvian has its own word for the old neighborhood place, the kafejnīca (café). In 2005 the journalist Tim Ochser described kafejnīcas on Stabu and Barona streets with plastic ferns, floral wallpaper, slot machines and brandy poured in 50 g measures, and mourned their loss to new chains spelled with a C, such as Coffee Nation and Double Coffee.⁶

In the early 2000s most people ordered black coffee or coffee with milk, and few places made espresso, cappuccino or latte. International chains such as Costa Coffee and Caffeine changed those habits.¹ All Cappuccino opened on Antonijas iela in 2004 and later added a second café on Vīlandes iela.⁸

Two spoons in a cup, then the roasters

As late as 2016, the coffee most Latvians drank was two teaspoons of pre-ground coffee in a cup, according to Mārtiņš Dzenis of Rocket Bean, who also said more cafés were opening in Riga while total coffee volume stayed flat.⁹

Rocket Bean began roasting in 2014 in its own café, and KALVE Coffee Roasters was founded in Riga in 2017; KALVE opened its first shop abroad, in Düsseldorf, in 2023. Smaller roasters now work in Rēzekne, Kuldīga, Gulbene and Sigulda.¹

Black balsam and the konditoreja

Latvia's herbal liqueur often ends up in the cup. Riga Black Balsam goes back to Abraham Kunze, a Riga pharmacist who began developing a medicinal tonic in 1752; after the Second World War, former employees rebuilt the recipe from memory in 1950.¹² Riga's tourist board calls a splash in coffee or tea perhaps the most common way to drink it, and the balsam shops also sell an Espresso flavor.¹²

Cake comes from the konditoreja (pastry shop), or in the regional word, the beķereja, a bakery or pastry shop.¹³ Chocolate is local too: Laima, Latvia's oldest chocolate factory, dates from 1870 and is the last of the old factories still working on Miera iela.¹⁰

Riga, from Vecrīga to Āgenskalns

Vecrīga, the Old Town, is where the Kaza stood.⁷ North of it, the Quiet Centre (Klusais centrs) holds the core of Riga's Art Nouveau: the city has about 800 Art Nouveau buildings, mostly in the center and along Alberta iela, where the Art Nouveau Museum at number 12 keeps an architect's apartment as it was in 1903.¹¹

Miera iela (Peace Street) began as a path to a graveyard outside the city limits and became a street when factories arrived in the late 19th century. Art Nouveau and National Romantic tenements followed in the early 20th, and some now have cafés on the ground floor.¹⁰ Rocket Bean opened its roastery café at Miera iela 29, across from the Laima factory, in 2015.⁹

Across the Daugava, Āgenskalns Market has traded since 1898. Its pavilion was renovated from 2018 and reopened in May 2022, with local produce and street food.¹⁴