Cafe hopping, explained and planned.

The word

What cafe hopping means.

Cafe hopping is going from café to café in one day, the way a bar crawl goes from bar to bar. People do it to try new places, to compare one drink (the flat white, the matcha latte) across a neighbourhood, or just to sit in a few good rooms with a book.

Cafe hopping or cafe hunting? They overlap. Cafe hunting is about the search — finding new or hidden cafés — and cafe hopping is the day out itself. Most people use them interchangeably.

Plan it

How to plan a cafe hop.

• Pick three or four cafés, five if one of them is mostly for food.
• Stay in one neighbourhood. Ten minutes’ walk between cafés is the sweet spot — enough to reset, not enough to tire.
• Check opening hours. Small cafés often close early, or one day a week. Put the earliest-closing one first.
• Give each one a job: one for the coffee, one for the pastry, one for the view, one to sit and read.
• Mix the drinks. Plan at least one tea, juice or hot chocolate stop so you are not on four espressos.
• Eat something real somewhere in the middle. Pastries alone will not carry you.
• Leave room for a surprise. The best café of the day is often the one you walked past by accident.

Last the day

What to order so you last.

• Ask for a smaller size or a single shot — most cafés will do it.
• Share pastries: one each per two people per café.
• Alternate coffee and non-coffee drinks.
• Water at every stop, before the coffee.
• If you are comparing one drink, order the same thing everywhere so the comparison is fair.
• Save the dessert-heavy café for last.

Copy this

Cafe hopping checklist.

• Three or four cafés, with opening hours noted.
• A walking route on your map, in order.
• One backup café nearby.
• Phone charged, and a power bank if you will be out all day.
• A book, a sketchbook or a journal for the sit-down stop.
• A tote bag for the beans or the bread you will definitely buy.
• Small change or cards — some cafés are card-only now.
• A reusable cup if you plan to take one to go.
• A friend who will share pastries fairly.

Sample

A sample cafe hopping day.

For after

Captions for after.

More in food trip captions.

• Four cafés, one very awake human.
• Today’s route was drawn in crumbs.
• Rating cafés by the chairs, honestly.
• Cup one was research. Cup four was commitment.
• Slow day, fast heartbeat.
• Found my new corner table.

Keep it

Keep every cup.

Drinks are saves too. In PlateDiary, snap the cup and the pastry together and each one is cut out and kept with the café and the time. Each café gets a place page with your usual order there and every visit, and the map pins every café you have tried — handy when someone asks where that good cortado was.