In 2007, businessman Suleiman al-Raji opened a coffee shop called Elixir Bunn in Riyadh—and accidentally lit the fuse under a thousand-year-old tradition. A country that brewed coffee long before Italians invented espresso perceived La Marzocco as cultural sabotage.
Saudi gahwa is not just a beverage. It's a ritual where arabica beans are simmered with cardamom, cloves, or saffron, poured from a copper dallah into tiny finjans, and served with the right hand, starting with the most respected guest. It's a code of hospitality where refusing the third cup is considered polite, but refusing the first is an insult. For centuries this mechanism worked flawlessly, turning coffee into social glue.
Al-Raji brought La Marzocco espresso machines from Europe, hired baristas trained in tamping technique and latte art, sourced single-origin beans from Ethiopia and Yemen—and opened the kingdom's first third-wave coffee shop. No cardamom. No finjans. Just steel pitchers, digital scales, and a philosophy where what matters most is terroir, roast profile, and extraction temperature in 25 seconds. For conservative circles this looked like a gastronomic coup: a foreign aesthetic invading the holy of holies.
Religious authorities immediately sounded the alarm. Western espresso was accused of "destroying Islamic coffee identity"—an absurd formulation, considering coffee came to the Islamic world from Yemen back in the 15th century, long before Italian cafés. But the logic here wasn't botanical, it was cultural: espresso symbolized globalization, individualism (alone at a table with cappuccino instead of collective ritual), and Western values. Dallah is us. La Marzocco is them. In a country where women were banned from driving until 2018, a coffee shop with a bar counter and Wi-Fi looked like an outpost of a foreign world.
Young Saudis voted with their feet. By the end of the 2000s, Elixir Bunn became a place where a generation raised on Netflix and foreign universities could feel part of global culture—without leaving the kingdom. Specialty coffee shops turned into a neutral zone between Wahhabi conservatism and the thirst for change. People didn't drink alcohol there, didn't violate dress codes, but the very fact of choice—Ethiopian Yirgacheffe instead of traditional gahwa—was an act of cultural defiance. The coffee shop stopped being just a coffee shop. It became a testing ground for identity, where the menu reflected the collision of eras.
The Saudi coffee market is an economic paradox where precise figures drown in contradictions. Some sources cite a volume of $1.3 billion, others $1.9 billion, and still others stay silent about methodology. But one thing is certain: every day in the kingdom, more than 36 million cups are consumed. That's roughly 1.2 cups per resident—including infants and those who prefer tea. By 2027, the number of coffee shops should exceed 5,350 locations, turning the country into one of the densest coffee markets in the region.
After Elixir Bunn's success, the market exploded with competitors. Camel Step, Brew92, WACAFE, Draft Cafe, Adab Cafe—each brand tried to find balance between Western aesthetics and local taste. Brew92, for example, bet on specialty coffee from Brazil and Colombia, but kept gahwa with cardamom on the menu—not from nostalgia, but from pragmatism. Older generation clients weren't ready to abandon the familiar ritual, while youth wanted flat whites and cold brew. The solution was simple: two menus in one coffee shop. Globalization and authenticity stopped being mutually exclusive.
Youssef Al Bassam started his journey in 2009, still a student at KFUPM (King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals), when specialty coffee in the kingdom was exotic. He didn't open a coffee shop—he built infrastructure: imported green beans, established logistics, trained roasters. In 2015, his company The Coffee Group partnered with American importer Café Imports, gaining access to auction lots from Kenya, Guatemala, and Ethiopia. This was a quiet revolution: Saudi roasters stopped depending on middlemen in Dubai or Istanbul. Beans came directly, with traceability documentation and Q-grader evaluations. The market shifted from importing finished products to controlling the supply chain.
The state sensed that coffee was not just culture but economics. In 2022, they launched Saudi Coffee Company, linked to the sovereign fund Public Investment Fund (the same one behind Vision 2030). The company promotes the Jazeen brand and regional varieties like khawlani from Jazan province, where they plan to plant more than 600,000 coffee trees. The idea is simple: transform Saudi Arabia from not just a consumer but also a producer of specialty coffee, using the terroir of southern provinces where climate allows growing arabica at elevations up to 2,000 meters. For now the volumes are modest, but symbolism matters more than tonnage: a country that for centuries imported Yemeni coffee now wants to compete with Yemen itself.
Religious critics got one thing wrong: they thought espresso would displace gahwa. Instead something stranger happened—hybridization. The modern Saudi coffee shop is a space where on one bar counter you find V60 with Ethiopian Sidamo next to dallah with cardamom. A customer can order Chemex with Kenyan coffee in the morning and traditional gahwa in the afternoon—without cognitive dissonance. It turned out that cultural identity isn't as fragile as conservatives believed, and not as aggressive as liberals feared.
This hybrid spread beyond the kingdom. Dubai, Doha, Kuwait—everywhere there's oil money and a young population, specialty coffee became a marker of modernization. But unlike Europe or the US, where third wave grew from counterculture and rejection of Starbucks, in the Middle East it integrated into existing coffee culture. % Arabica in Dubai serves espresso with cardamom as a seasonal specialty. Café Younes in Beirut mixes Turkish coffee with cold brew. Tradition didn't die—it mutated, grew new organs, and learned to breathe in a new environment.
The paradox of Elixir Bunn is that the cultural war ended in negotiation. Specialty coffee shops didn't destroy Islamic coffee identity—they expanded its definition. Gahwa remained a ritual, but espresso became a choice. And in a society where choice was for decades limited by religious police and social norms, even choosing a bean variety becomes a political gesture. By the time Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman launched Vision 2030 in 2016, coffee shops had already done part of the work: they showed that modernization doesn't necessarily mean Westernization, and that tradition can coexist with innovation—if you give them a shared bar counter.
The story of Elixir Bunn is not a story of third wave's victory over tradition. It's a story of how the market proved smarter than ideologues. Conservatives demanded banning espresso, liberals dreamed of burying gahwa, and business simply put both drinks on the same menu—and profited from both. Today the Saudi coffee market is worth over a billion dollars, and the number of coffee shops is growing faster than statistics can be updated.
Suleiman al-Raji didn't plan a cultural revolution. He just wanted to open a good coffee shop. But in a country where every gesture is read as a manifesto, even a cup of flat white becomes a statement. Specialty coffee in the Middle East turned out to be not an import of Western culture, but a mirror in which the region examines its own future: where terroir matters more than brand origin, where ritual doesn't cancel technology, and where choosing between La Marzocco and dallah no longer requires choosing between identities.
Saudi Arabia's coffee industry continues to grow, sprouting roasting facilities, barista championships, and educational programs. In 2026 the question is no longer whether espresso will defeat tradition—but how many more hybrids they'll spawn before the market saturates. So far there's no answer. There are only numbers: 36 million cups a day, 5,350 coffee shops by 2027, and a country that learned to drink coffee in two voices simultaneously—without noticing the contradiction.