The Cozy Appeal of Turning Your Apartment Into a ‘Coffee Shop’

“Home cafe” has taken on a new meaning. What five years ago primarily referred to a style of ASMR video, in which people made complicated specialty drinks for the sake of beautiful content, has become something more tangible: a hosting trend in which people play barista for a day, turning their apartments (or dorms) into free “coffee shops” for their friends, complete with menus, pastries, and sometimes even custom cups.

Brandon Chou, a content creator in Los Angeles, has been hosting at-home coffee shop events since last summer. He sets up his espresso machine, pour over gear, and a matcha station on a makeshift island in his dining room. His friends, who he’s invited to stop by anytime within a set range of hours, arrive; consult the menu; then place their orders. It’s an opportunity for Chou, who is passionate about coffee but has never been a barista professionally, to go all-in on his hobby.

The trend has been making the rounds for a while. In late 2022, creator Daniel Bennett went viral on TikTok with a video of a friend’s weekly apartment coffee shop; it has over 4.5 million views as of this writing. A few months later, Bennett posted an update: The apartment coffee shop had gotten much bigger, becoming more like a large daytime party.

It’s not only that hosting is back, but that, for some people, a more maximalist, conceptual style of hosting has caught on. You could just pick up pastries and make coffee for a brunch hosted at home, but if you’re doing that already, why not lean into a theme? As someone commented on one video, “It’s so fun that we still play pretend as adults.” The home cafe playfully romanticizes a very basic idea: having friends over for coffee.

This idea of imbuing eating at home with the allure of cafe or restaurant culture isn’t limited to the coffee shop experience. The TikTok creator @agoodtable affixes menus titled “Café Home” to her fridge, listing the meals she can make for dinner based on what’s ready to go in her fridge; it’s a more appealing phrase than “meal prep,” although essentially a similar idea. And, of course, when the pandemic hit, many home cooks felt inspired to bring the romance of the restaurant home. But the home cafe has gained steam because, unlike a multi-course meal, it’s a little more accessible.

Victoria Lauren Da Silva, a content creator in Montreal, has hosted four at-home cafes since February, after seeing the idea on Reels. She picks up pastries and offers a slim menu of espresso-based drinks, rotating between different local roasters. Her “Saturday Cafe” is specialized; none of her guests drink cow’s milk, she says, so she stocks only oat milk and almond milk. Like the best cafes, Saturday Cafe has a signature item: A friend of Da Silva’s bakes the same cookies every time.

Though Da Silva enjoys hosting — mostly dinner parties — she appreciates the lower stakes of the cafe concept, both for herself and for her friends. Knowing that everyone is busy, “I like that there’s no pressure to show up at a certain time and leave at a certain time,” she says. Her friends like the Saturday Cafe so much that some of them even stay past “closing time.” Da Silva adds, “As much as I love hosting, I’m not the best cook, so the fact that I don’t have to cook a meal for people is really nice.” Instead, she bakes one specialty cake for each event.

The home cafe is as much work as a host wants to put into it. Chou initially offered a large specialty menu, with espresso tonics and specialty lattes — each available einspänner-style too — in addition to more basic options. Since the number of options combined with the large guest list could feel chaotic, Chou, who’s done about six home cafes now, has simplified his menu and decreased his guest list. Even at the home cafe, there can be rushes.

Some people bake elaborate spreads; others go entirely store-bought. Wanting to practice graphic design, Da Silva made branding for her cafe: Her logo is a hand wrapped around a coffee cup in royal blue, and it appears on her menus, on the hand-stamped paper bags she uses for each pastry, on a sign on her door, and alongside her themed playlist. Some hosts get disposable cups, sometimes with custom sleeves, stickers, or stamps; others use only their own mug collections. They display menus on hanging butcher paper, in artsy designs inside frames, and on letterboard signs, but even scrawling on a piece of paper does the job.

Calvin Tan hosts pop-up coffee shops out of the New York City dorm where he’s also a resident advisor. “We’re asked to host events that we’re passionate about, so I might as well do something I enjoy,” he says. (Ideally, he’d have them on a monthly basis, but finals have thrown him off.) As a nursing student, the pop-ups, and his work as an RA, are an outlet for dealing with academic stress and what he sees in the hospital. Tan has distant dreams of a coffee shop he’d like to open, and the pop-ups “give me a taste of it,” he says.

Since the question comes up a lot: No, just like a typical dinner party, the coffee and pastries don’t cost anything for guests. Since NYC coffee shops are so pricey, Tan likes being able to pull inspiration from cafes that charge $10 to $12 for a drink to provide a similar experience to the students in his building for free. And though he doesn’t ask anyone to bring anything, Chou often ends up with a “mountain of pastries” from friends anyway.

“I think people definitely wonder how to keep up with the cost,” Chou says. He explains that, for him, it’s been more of an initial investment than a continued cost. (Of course, the idea was made possible by the fact that he already had coffee gear including an espresso machine.) While an early home cafe of Chou’s ran him around $100, as he described in a YouTube video, his costs have gone down. With a simpler menu, he doesn’t need so many specialty syrups. He’s moving toward using glass cups, as opposed to buying plastic ones. With his coffee shop content getting lots of views, he’s gotten brand sponsors to provide matcha and coffee.

Ultimately, the home cafe is about hospitality. If Da Silva wasn’t running her Saturday Cafe, she’d be hosting dinners anyway, she notes. “I feel like cost-wise that’s pretty similar, if not more expensive,” she says. If anything, her Saturday Cafe has gotten her to go to coffee shops a little less.

“The appeal is just that it’s for friends,” Chou says. “When I’m making coffee, it’s nice to look up and see that everyone’s just really happy.”

Additional photo illustration credits: Left two images by Victoria Lauren Da Silva; rightmost image by Brandon Chou