Gen Z’s Love Affair with Cafe Culture
Remember when the coffee shop experience was claiming 'your' couch at Central Perk? The '90s turned cafés into extended living rooms where you could debate whether Ross and Rachel were really on a break, all while your latte grew cold and forgotten. Coffee was the excuse, but community was the point. Today's café theater looks different: people queue for hours not to find their usual table, but to film the perfect pour of matcha or capture that Instagram-worthy blueberry syrup spiral, turning every drink order into content creation.
But somewhere between Wi-Fi at Starbucks and TikTok making a trend out of every beverage, cafés no longer just were cafés. They became third spaces, aesthetic playgrounds, and cultural laboratories. Gen Z did not invent café culture, but we reprogrammed it into a lifestyle that is part ritual, part spectacle, and part self-care. From the rise of matcha (the monastic drink turned influencer prop) to the way boba has settled from a trendy sensation into nostalgic familiarity, cafés are no longer just a place to drink. Cafés represent who we've become as a generation.
So, do we love the taste, or are we just addicted to filming it?
Courtesy of Shrishti Das
The answer reveals something deeper about how Generation Z relates to consumption itself. We've transformed café culture from a social ritual into a content creation pipeline, where the aesthetic value of a drink often outweighs its actual taste. This isn't just about filming everything (though we certainly do that); it's about living in a constant state of curation, where every beverage choice becomes a micro-decision about personal branding.
The change did not occur overnight. It started rather subtly in March 2020, when dalgona coffee took over our feeds, followed by the slow return of boba nostalgia, then the matcha explosion, and now whatever adaptogenic elixir is trending this week. Each drink era taught us something slightly different about what we were looking for from café culture. Dalgona showed us we could create Instagram-worthy moments from instant coffee and patience. Boba taught us that some trends go full circle when we need comfort, and matcha taught us we will consistently pay premium prices for drinks that look like a meditation session and taste like self-care.
We've convinced ourselves that consuming these drinks connects us to something more meaningful. Ancient traditions, mindful practices, and holistic wellness. It's cultural tourism in a cup, where we get to perform worldliness and spiritual awareness without actually engaging with the cultures these drinks come from. A $7 matcha latte lets us cosplay as someone who values contemplation and tradition, even as we're photographing it for TikTok.
The cycle is always this: someone finds a drink or rediscovers an old one, that drink goes viral, cafes add it to their menus, we line up for it, we document it in some manner, and then we forget about it for something new. However, it is not just about the trends as it is about how quickly we can turn any beverage into a cultural moment. We took a Korean staple drink and gave it global cultural currency. We took the ancient “Tea of Immortality” and turned it into the trendiest sip on every wellness feed. We have transformed beverages into time capsules, capturing unique moments in our collective online shared memory, each drink representing a different moment.
The real genius isn't so much in converting beverages into content (which we did and at scale), turning genuine experiences into performative content without losing the feeling of authenticity. Sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term "third space" in the 1980s to describe neutral spaces that were not your home or work. Today's café culture represents the exact opposite. We've created spaces where visibility is the point, where being seen (and photographed) is more important than simply being.
Influencer cafés like Chamberlain Coffee, which is expected to reach $33 million in revenue this year, express something larger than a profit story. These spaces understand, we aren't buying drinks. We are buying moments, contexts, and the infrastructure around real experiences that are shareable. Every piece of furniture is coordinated for natural light, every wall is a potential backdrop, and somehow this conscious design doesn't feel calculated, but rather it feels considerate.
The line between considerate and calculated has become impossibly thin. When a café installs ring lighting "for ambiance" or chooses millennial pink walls "for warmth," are they creating a welcoming space or engineering viral moments? Interior designers have quietly become algorithm whisperers, studying not just color theory and spatial flow, but engagement rates and hashtag performance. What feels like thoughtful hospitality is actually sophisticated manipulation: every Instagram-ready corner, every perfectly imperfect exposed brick wall, and every strategically placed neon sign designed not just to make you comfortable, but to make you post.
Courtesy of Shrishti Das
But the most interesting shift is how we have cultivated café culture as emotional infrastructure. We are a generation that turned functional beverages into a trend.
We expect our beverages to work as hard as we do, which, considering our relationship with productivity, is saying a lot. The morning matcha becomes a mindfulness practice, the evening moon milk becomes a signal of when to log off, and the afternoon yerba mate becomes a small act of self-care in the middle of chaos.
The beautiful irony is: we have turned performative cafe culture behavior into something that feels genuinely meaningful. We are the most documented and yet the most isolated generation. We are creating individual content while building collective culture, filming alone but participating in something larger.
What older generations often fail to understand is that we are not mindless trend-chasers. We are creating culture together in real time with intention and purpose. Every viral drink we post, every aesthetic café we visit, every carefully curated flat lay with our meal, is part of a larger conversation about authenticity, connection, and self-expression in a world where the distinctions between physical and digital experience are reduced to insignificance.
The criticism that we spend too much time filming our drinks assumes that documentation and experience are mutually exclusive. But what if they're not? What if the ritual of filming: the careful framing, the attention to light and texture, is itself a form of embodied presence, just mediated through technology.
The future of café culture will likely involve more hybridized experiences in ways where the lines between physical and digital space will continue to blur. It seems we can count on Gen Z having a knack for taking existing cultural forms and turning them into something relevant to our emotional and creative needs.
That could be the real secret of café culture. It is not the caffeine, the matcha foam, or even the trending TikTok drinks that draw us. It is how these spaces allow us to pause, and perform at the same time, be public in private, be ordinary and aesthetic all at once. Each cup becomes both ritual and record.
And maybe, years from now, when matcha is replaced by the next neon adaptogen blend, we will not remember the taste, but we will remember the feeling. That somewhere between the clatter of mugs and the turquoise glow of laptop screens, we made small places for ourselves. Places where we could sit, sip, scroll, dream, and believe, if only for a moment, that life really can be as beautiful as it looks.