Kuppa / Est. 1997 / One of Bangkok’s Early Coffee Roasters
Robin came back to Bangkok from Australia with an idea the city was not ready for. A cafe where coffee was roasted on-site. A menu moving from breakfast through to late lunch without asking you to leave. A space where you could actually sit, stay, and feel at home. This was 1997. Bangkok ran on instant coffee and hotel lobbies.
She found a derelict industrial warehouse on Sukhumvit and designed the whole thing herself. High ceilings, floor-to-ceiling glass along the front wall, hessian sacks of raw beans stacked between the tables. The roaster went in the corner of the dining room. Visible, working, part of the room rather than hidden away. It was half-Thai, half-Australian in the way that Robin herself is: not a compromise between two cultures but a confident combination of both.
The menu followed the same logic. Thai herb salads next to smashed eggs on toast. A proper flat white next to a bowl of tom kha. Long before fusion became a tired word, Kuppa was just cooking the way its founder ate.
Nearly thirty years on, the warehouse looks much as it did. The roaster still turns. The beans still supply cafes and hotels across Thailand. The flat white is still worth the trip. Bangkok has built an entire specialty coffee industry around the ideas that Kuppa was running with before most of the city had heard of a single origin.
There is something to be said for being first and staying good.
39 Sukhumvit Soi 16, Asoke / +66 2 663 0495 / @kuppathailand In-house roasted beans available to take home. Ask about their seasonal single origin.