In Iran and Afghanistan, going to a café is an almost recent activity. We usually prefer to get together in our houses or parks, and prepare food together. Traditionally, we have teahouses, qahve(h)xâne(h) in Persian, which are mostly places where men get together to drink tea and smoke hookah. Teahouses are very different from what we can call a café. People sit on the beds which are covered by carpets and lean against big traditional cushions, called pošti in Farsi. As it comes to everyone’s mind, the word “qahve(h)xâne(h)” refers to a place in which “qahve(h)”, coffee in English, is served while in reality no one can find “qahve(h)” in “qahve(h)xâne(h)”.  Although going to a café in small towns and villages is still rare, teahouses these days are giving their place to cafés and coffee shops in big cities like Tehran, Yazd, Kabul, etc.

The establishment of the first modern cafés in Tehran dates back to Reza Shah Time, in late 1930s but it took almost seven decades for coffee shops to become common places for gatherings especially among younger generation. So, cafés and coffee shops in Iran and Afghanistan are almost same as the ones you can find everywhere around the world with slight differences. Here our focus is mostly on coffee shops.

•  In Iran, you cannot find the chain cafés like Starbucks. Everything is local and there is no specific brand with more than a couple of branches. Therefore, the menu and the taste of coffee and tea can totally vary from one place to the other. Some coffee shops serve only coffee and tea with cakes and cookies. But in most of them, you can find various types of herbal tea, damnuš in Persian, or sweet traditional drinks called “šarbat” in Farsi.
•  Iran is a country with tea culture, so drinking coffee is used to be considered as luxurious and also symbol of intellectualism. Drinking coffee is more common among Armenians who brought it to Iran while immigrating. So the best café are owned or managed by Armenians who are usually respected minorities in Iran because they have brought modern painting, music and new cultural perspectives to this country.