Cafés in Switzerland Zurich

A trading hub without a harvest

An estimated 60 to 70% of the world's green coffee trade passes through Swiss trading desks, and the more than 40 members of the Swiss Coffee Trade Association control over half of the green coffee traded worldwide.¹ Many of the large green coffee traders have set up in Basel, the Rhine port where the beans arrive.¹

The ties are older than the trading houses. Switzerland never had colonies, but Swiss families owned plantations abroad. The Escher family, whose Alfred Escher is regarded as one of the architects of modern Switzerland, owned a coffee plantation in Cuba.¹

Nescafé, Nespresso and the machines

Instant coffee is a Swiss product of the 1930s. Nestlé launched Nescafé in 1938 as a powdered extract of pure coffee, developed by Max Morgenthaler after the Brazilian government asked the company to find an outlet for its coffee surplus.³ The Nespresso capsule system followed in 1986, sold first in Japan, Italy and Switzerland.³ Nespresso still makes its capsules only in three Swiss factories, and capsules explain most of the sharp rise in Swiss coffee exports since the early 2000s.¹

The country also builds the equipment. About 70% of the fully automatic coffee machines sold worldwide are made in Switzerland, by firms such as Jura, Schaerer and Thermoplan, and Thermoplan supplies the machines in every Starbucks.¹

Café crème, Schale and Kafi Luz

Ask for a coffee in a Swiss café and you get a café crème: an espresso drawn long, to about 120 ml instead of 25 ml, served with coffee cream of about 10% fat. The crème in the name is that cream, not the foam on top.⁴ In German-speaking Switzerland it is also called a Schümli. About one in three coffees served is one, and the drink is hardly known abroad.⁵

A Schale, often called by its French name café au lait, is milk coffee, and a café mélange comes with whipped cream, often in a separate dish. A café complet is a meal rather than a drink: milk coffee with bread, butter, jam, cheese and cold cuts, eaten for breakfast or, traditionally, for supper.⁴

Coffee with schnapps is the Kafi Luz, also called Luzerner Kafi or Kafi fertig: thin coffee with sugar and a schnapps such as Träsch, plum brandy or kirsch, served in a glass. Topped with whipped cream it becomes a Schümli-Pflümli.⁴ Träsch is a brandy of pears and some apples from Central Switzerland, where it is mostly drunk mixed with weak coffee.¹¹

Zurich

Zurich is the most expensive city in German-speaking Switzerland for a café crème. CafetierSuisse's 2024 survey put the city average at CHF 4.86, against CHF 4.58 across the region, and some restaurants in the canton charged up to CHF 6.⁶

Its grand cafés are old. The Café Odeon on Limmatquai, an art nouveau coffeehouse on the Viennese model, opened on 1 July 1911; the founders of Dada were regulars, and so were Einstein, Lenin and James Joyce.⁷ Confiserie Sprüngli dates from 1836, when David Sprüngli bought a small bakery on the Marktgasse, and has kept its shop on Paradeplatz since 1859. Its house specialty is the Luxemburgerli, a small filled macaron.⁸

Specialty coffee took hold in Kreis 4 and 5, west of the Old Town. MAME, in Kreis 5 with a second branch in Seefeld, is run by Emi Fukahori, Swiss Barista Champion in 2015 and World Brewers Cup champion in 2018, and Mathieu Theis, a former Swiss Barista Champion.⁹ Miró, a roastery-café on Brauerstrasse run since 2018 by the brothers Daniel and David Sanchez, was named Switzerland's Roaster of the Year in 2025.¹⁰