The Best Cape Town Coffee Shops

Cape Town’s best coffee shops and roasters are about to be revealed. Whether you’re an oat milk cortado seeker, or a simple black coffee drinker, our list of the best coffee shops in Cape Towns uncovers our favourite beans, brews and baristas in the mother city. Our 2023 guide to the best cafes and coffee shops in Cape Town’s CBD and around the city has something to please all caffeine lovers.

Our favourite cafes and coffee shops in Cape Town:

1. Rosetta Roastery (CBD)
2. Labotessa (CBD)
3. Honest Chocolate (CBD
4. Truth Coffee Roasting (CBD)
5. The Ladder (CBD)
6. Bootlegger Coffee Company (Various Locations)
7. Cafe Frank (CBD)
8. Clarke’s Bar & Dining Room (CBD)
9. SALT (Kalk Bay)

Rosetta Roastery

The best coffee in Cape Town is the Rosetta Roastery on Bree Street. This white-painted, marble tabled establishment is perched on the corner of Bree and Shortmarket. Head on up the short staircase to the coffee bar where you’ll be offered two roasts: classic or experimental. If it’s a hot day, we highly recommend a Taisho — a creamy, sweetened iced Japanese-style coffee. The food menu here is brief but excellent. It’s an ideal spot for a brunch of savoury rye, cultured cheese and boiled eggs, or a breakfast of pink peppercorn granola. There’s a good pastry selection and the best Basque burnt cheesecake in town, which alternates daily between traditional and matcha versions.

Labotessa

Coffee at a Cape Town boutique hotel may seem like a wild card, but Labotessa‘s coffee is a delight. Labotessa is a stylish boutique hotel on Church Square with a cafe that’s open to non-guests. It has both an out-front terrace, complete with plants, jazz and a water feature, as well as a stylish interior. The coffee here comes served in Le Creuset mugs with a little biscuit and it’s the only place in town that will give you a truly ‘extra hot’ coffee on request. The service here is top-notch, making it the friendliest coffee stop in the city. It’s the perfect place to enjoy a cortado before joining the Bo-Kaap Walking Tour, which also sets off from Church Square.

Bonus Tip: Do you ever see fancy hotels and wonder what they look like on the inside? We do all the time, and a simple “trick” you can use to satisfy your curiosity is to walk inside, find a bar and order a coffee! Almost all hotels serve coffee to non-guests and a simple americano is never going to break the bank.

Honest Chocolate Cafe

A heaven-on-earth for those with a sweet-tooth, Honest Chocolate Cafe is a cosy, snug cafe that’s perfect for a cold and cloudy moment in Cape Town. The difficulty is, of course, choosing whether to have a coffee or hot chocolate. The chocolate here is made from bean to bar using ethically sourced cacao beans from Tanzania, and is free from all the ‘bad stuff’ you find in processed chocolate bars. We visited the cafe a couple of times: once for a morning coffee and brownie, and the second time for an evening hot chocolate. The espresso-style hot chocolate which comes in a small cup just bigger than an espresso amount is rich, delicious and intense. You can also buy an assortment of chocolate-based desserts, bars and truffles to eat-in or take home.

At the back of Honest Chocolate, you’ll find a gorgeous tiled courtyard with an adjoined gin bar, bubbles bar and a staircase up to a ramen place. All of these fantastic places share the same building.

Truth Coffee Roasting

Spend a moment in the steampunk world of Truth Coffee Roasting. If you’re after a unique coffee experience, look no further than Truth Coffee Roasting. This steampunk-themed cafe features machinery, a darkened interior and very well costumed staff. I enjoyed my macadamia-milk cortado (40 ZAR), which was just one item from an extensive menu. The coffee flavours here were more bitter than the usual cafe roasts. The newspaper-styled menus offered plenty in the way of breakfast and lunch too, including omnipresent options like avocado on toast.

Truth Coffee Roasting is just a block away from the District 6 Museum. You’ll also find a Truth Coffee Roasting stall in the V&A Food Market.

The Ladder Cafe

The Ladder Cafe is a light, bright space to enjoy one of their famous large-cup artisan coffees with frothed milk. The open-front, white-painted building with a beautiful semi-circle window stands alone on Bree Street and is a popular spot for Saturday morning brunchers. Highly recommended for lovers of lattes and milky coffees, but you can get a decent espresso roast here too. There’s an Orthodox Chapel on the top floor of the building, though the cafe isn’t itself a religious space. Check their listings for workshops and events.

Bootlegger Coffee Company

Bootlegger Coffee Company serves up punchy cups of everyone’s favourite brew at locations all across Cape Town (and now Johannesburg too). I must admit, I was snobbishly in no rush to visit Bootlegger, assuming that because it’s a successful chain the quality would be low. Quite the opposite. I enjoyed the coffee here more than at plenty of the independent places we visited and came away impressed. We visited the Bootlegger Coffee Company on Bree Street, but there are branches across the city.

Cafe Frank

Cafe Frank is a light and spacious place to enjoy a hot cup of coffee as well as a healthy breakfast and lunch. We found ourselves coming back to Cafe Frank not just for the coffee, but for the delicious overnight oats and fruit breakfast and quiche and salad lunch. If you’ve enjoyed a glass of wine too many at one of the vineyards, Cafe Frank is the perfect place to come next morning and make amends.

Clarke’s Bar & Dining Room

If you can’t decide whether it’s time for coffee or something alcoholic, then Clarke’s Bar & Dining Room has you covered. This popular and bigger-than-it-looks on the outside establishment serves coffees and croissants in the morning and wines, beers and olives in the evening. Naturally this means you have to visit at least twice to enjoy everything Clarke’s has to offer! Side note: Cape Town doesn’t have great croissants and Clarke’s was the only place we found with croissants close to how the French pastry should be.

SALT

Our favourite coffee shop in the beautiful Kalk Bay is SALT. With sea views, dark wooden tables and a blackboard menu of small plates, this little cafe is perfect for coffee with the smell of the sea air or a light lunch. SALT’s double-shot cortado is a perfect antidote on those tired mornings. SALT is also open late into the evening for dinner too and we’d highly recommend it if you’re in the area. We loved their squash ravioli and pan-fried sugar snap peas.