Cafés in Nepal Kathmandu

Hira Giri's seeds and the first estates

The National Tea and Coffee Development Board's account begins in 1938, when a hermit, Hira Giri, carried coffee seeds from Burma (now Myanmar) to Aapchaur in Gulmi district.²¹ Some coffee traders credit Gurkha soldiers and Nepali workers on South Indian plantations instead. Either way, coffee stayed a curiosity plant for more than four decades.¹

Commercial production started in 1976 with arabica brought from South India.³ The Nepal Coffee Company was set up at Manigram, Rupandehi, in 1983/84, and the main shift to commercial farming followed in the mid-1980s.² Up to 2000, exports came to just 3.6 tonnes a year.¹ At that point they earned Rs 673,000, while imports of instant coffee cost Rs 43.2 million.²

Private estates and exporters followed. In 1990 Ujjwal Rana began commercial farming in Nuwakot with Caturra seed from Papua New Guinea.² By 2005 Nepal was exporting 65 tonnes of beans a year, and one Nepali company had shipped 23 tonnes the year before to Holland Coffee, a supplier to Starbucks.³

Mid-hill coffee on small farms

Nepali coffee grows in the mid-hills at 800 to 1,600 m, often among fruit trees and other crops rather than in monoculture estates.³ Gulmi, Palpa, Syangja, Lalitpur, Sindhupalchok and Kavre are among the growing districts.¹ In 2019 Kavrepalanchowk produced the most, from 943 farms on 104.3 ha.² Gandaki Province, around Pokhara, grew 156 tonnes in 2024/25, mainly in Kaski, Syangja, Gorkha, Lamjung, Tanahun and Parbat, and Pokhara alone has more than 1,500 coffee shops.⁴

Planting has run ahead of the harvest. Between fiscal 2013/14 and 2022/23 the coffee area grew from 1,911 to 3,655 ha, while output swung between 314 and 530 tonnes a year.⁵

Chiya first, then coffee

The everyday hot drink is chiya, tea. Dudh chiya (milk tea) is black tea boiled with milk, water and sugar, sometimes with ginger or cardamom.⁸ Tea planting goes back to the 19th century, when Colonel Gajraj Singh Thapa started plantations in Ilam and Soktim.⁸ Guests and colleagues are greeted with "Chiya khane?" ("Will you have tea?"), and refusing the cup is considered improper.⁷

Cafés came late. Until the late 1990s, coffee in Nepal meant instant coffee, found in a few hotels and restaurants.⁶ Nepal's towns probably had fewer than 20 coffee shops until 2003, and home consumption rose noticeably only after 2002.¹

Kathmandu: Thamel, Jhamsikhel and the valley

Himalayan Java opened its first coffee house at Heritage Plaza in Kamaladi in 1999, aiming at office workers.⁶¹¹ In a valley with chiya pasals (tea stalls) in even the narrowest lanes, some customers refused to pay for a drink they found bitter.¹¹ The café moved to Thamel, which had more tourists passing; the company began selling franchises in 2017 and had 43 outlets worldwide by 2022.⁶

Thamel, about 1.4 km north of Durbar Square, has been the center of Kathmandu's tourist trade since the hippie days: narrow alleys of shops, restaurants, budget hotels and mountaineering-gear stores.¹⁰

In Lalitpur, Jhamsikhel was mostly a quiet residential area close to Patan Durbar Square before restaurants, bars and cafés spread along its streets.⁹ Bagmati Province, which includes Kathmandu, drinks the most coffee in Nepal, ahead of Gandaki.⁴ Beans that are not Nepali mostly come from India, Italy, Thailand and Indonesia.⁶