How Philly’s coffee shop scene helps local immigrant and BIPOC communities feel at home

On quiet evenings when he’s missing Türkiye, there’s one place Serdar Canpolat goes.

The Moorestown resident and his family venture out to Isot Turkish Cuisine in Queen Village every two weeks. Canpolat, who grew up in Şanlıurfa, Türkiye (the country’s preferred spelling), visits his friend Fatih Kekec’s white-tablecloth restaurant for a taste of his homeland.

Canpolat and his family enjoy cups of piping hot Turkish coffee, made from finely ground coffee beans brewed in a traditional cezve pot, with lokum, square-shaped Turkish jelly confections, after a hearty meal. Isot offers eight different brews, including menengiç, made from fruits collected from terebinth tree (similar to pistachio tree), and damla salizli, which gets its refreshing taste and aroma of mastic or aromatic gum/resin from a mastic tree. The coffee and sweet comes with a glass of water to help cleanse the palate for a full experience.

Isot offers a place for Canpolat to “feel we are in our country and our hometown,” he says, and celebrate his cultural traditions with his children.

“We stop at Turkish restaurant just to drink the coffee — it’s very important for us,” he said. “I like to spend time with them [his kids] and show them our culture, our hometown taste. It’s very beautiful and very good for immigrant kids.”

Coffee shops and cafes are classic example of third places, a term used to describe social environments outside home and work.

For Philly’s immigrants, diaspora, and BIPOC communities, the city’s many cafes offer more than just great coffee. They also offer a connection to culture and community

Thu Pham’s Càphê Roasters in Kensington is one of the United States’ first Vietnamese roasteries/shops reclaiming Vietnam’s bitter, strong robusta beans as a quality product unto itself, brewed via the traditional phin coffee maker. In West Philly, Hayat Ali of Alif Brew & Mini Mart celebrates sweeter, smoother arabica beans from Ethiopia, made in a jebena clay pot for the monthly traditional buna tetu, or coffee ceremony.

No matter the difference in coffee beans, the two shops on opposite sides of the city share the same mission: creating a familiar public spot for visitors of all backgrounds, especially Vietnamese and Ethiopian immigrants and diaspora.

“The goal was always to have a cafe or a restaurant, because Vietnamese culture and a lot of Asian cultures, especially Southeast Asian cultures, when there’s drinks, there’s food,” said Pham, who began the roastery in 2018 and opened the cafe in 2021. “And when there’s drinks and food, there’s family and friends.”

Friends are at the center of the third place experience for Debora Charmelus, the content creator and founder of CADO market, which celebrates Black-owned businesses. A point of community building, coffee shops are an excuse to meet up with friends and explore neighborhoods outside her home in West Philly. She spends her free time making Instagram reels and TikToks highlighting Black-owned coffee shops in Philly.

Charmelus didn’t realize just how many BIPOC coffee shops there where in the city until she began her series. What was interesting for her to see was the number of people excited to point her to their local Black-owned coffee shop.

“People feel a sense of connection to these shops, especially local small businesses, where you get to go in and you actually meet the owner and you can truly connect with them,” she said. “People really feel a sense of ownership, even if they’re not the ones literally owning it.”

The connection between owners and customers is strong at Avenues Café in Mount Airy, which serves Colombian medium roast and custom-made espresso blends in an inclusive environment. It’s what makes this Black Indigenous-owned-and-operated coffee shop a favorite third place for BIPOC and queer folks in the neighborhood and beyond. It was important to Juston Lee Locklear, who opened the cafe in 2021, to create a homey aesthetic where artists share their work with visitors making themselves at home as Indigenous flute music and jazz music float throughout the cafe.

Locklear appreciates the importance of sustainability and fair trade in coffee — something he learned growing up on a farm in the Lumbee Tribe region in North Carolina — with coffee beans and a custom-made espresso blend sourced from Many Hands Coffee Co. A portion of sales goes to the Native American Housing Alliance, an urban nonprofit promoting the general welfare of Indigenous peoples in the Philadelphia area.

“I have a staff of five, and four of us have Indigenous roots, and that’s something you don’t really get to hear a lot about,” Locklear said. “We do consider ourselves to be a safe space — 100% of all of our team members come from disadvantaged backgrounds either that’s race, creed, gender. I think that element also provides some kind of comfortability for people that are queer or of color — they can feel more comfortable being in space [with folks of similar backgrounds].”

Charmelus points out that many of the immigrant- and BIPOC-owned establishments offer more than coffee, citing places like American Grammar, a bookstore and cafe in Kensington, and Uncle Bobbie’s Coffee & Books, another book and coffee shop hybrid in Germantown.

“It feels like when I’m talking to people who wanted to start their shop, usually they’re like, ‘I just wanted to create a place where people could come together and I really liked coffee,’” she said. “I don’t think that they’re overcompensating when they’re doing double duty, I view it as more of a conduit for community.”

That community exists all over Philadelphia. In Chinatown, Ray’s Cafe & Tea House combines a menu of Taiwanese and Chinese dishes with siphon coffee practices for a place Lawrence Ray of the family store considers “the American dream.”

His mother, owner Grace Chen, opened the spot on North Ninth Street in 1989 to offer her favorite style of coffee. When she emigrated to Philly from Taiwan, gas stations and diners were the only places to get coffee, Ray explained. Rather than settling for those options, Chen decided to bring siphon coffee to Philly, a popular brewing method in Taiwan during the ‘70s and ‘80s where a vacuum pot with coffee grounds mixed with boiling water ascends from a flask through a siphonage to extract and filter back for a fresh cup.

“What makes it so special is each coffee is made to order — instead of a pot [of coffee] just sitting there, you choose beans, then we freshly grind them and we make it right in front of you,” Ray said. “You see a person doing the work rather than the machine. And the way it’s designed, you’re getting full flavor potential out of your coffee [bean of choice].”

The cafe’s coffee counter, which offers beans from South America to East Asia, displays the tall siphon coffee makers in all their glory, and the comfortable seating area with a “no laptops” sign emulates the Taiwanese tradition of enjoying coffee at your neighborhood spot, “where you can kick it with your friends.”

Ali at Alif Brew had the same concept in mind when opening the Baltimore Avenue favorite in 2020. In the early days of her cafe and market, she welcomed folks to her new business with buna tetu, the traditional coffee ceremony where she gathers guests on the floor to serve a freshly roasted blend of Yirgacheffe and Sidamo Ethiopian coffees in a jebena clay pot. She brews the coffee in the pot in a small electric oven until it bubbles and serves it hot in small espresso cups with popcorn and kolo (roasted grain snack) — the savory items complement the rich chocolate aroma.

“I remember that time we open Alif and we start this coffee ceremony — that [was] the first time in West Philly, I make that coffee,” she continued. “Everybody’s sitting low. We start drinking coffee, and before we know it, we start seeing eye to eye just like normal times [before COVID]. It was a beautiful time for me, I never forget that moment.”

On the cafe’s three-year anniversary this year, Ali feels she’s achieved her goal of being a “community coffee shop.”

She offers the complimentary ceremony monthly at Alif and sister shop Salam Cafe to continue sharing her cultural traditions and give her customers the opportunity to connect with her and each other.

The buna tetu ceremony is “our time to talk about any problem you have with your kids, your marriage, your community stuff — everything is discussed around coffee,” she said.

“My place is home for a lot of people,” she added. “So many people appreciate [the ceremony] — [like] many students, they missing home and they need some cuddles. Coffee makes you cuddle.”