11 Top Specialty Coffee Shops and Cafes in Jakarta
Jakarta has one of Southeast Asia’s most developed specialty coffee infrastructures, casting a city-wide network of serious cafés. It’s no secret that Indonesia produces beautiful coffees, and Jakarta is where a good chunk of it gets roasted, cupped, and served at specialty standards. While visiting Jakarta for the World of Coffee in 2025, I put together this guide that maps the best coffee shops I’ve been to.
Aston Utan, Daryanto Witarsa, Yoshua Tanu and Philip Chen started Common Grounds in 2014, right when Jakarta’s third-wave movement was gaining momentum. Common Grounds FX Sudirman is where Jakarta learned to coffee and brunch. It’s a mall café, yes, but Common Grounds roasts their own beans and trains staff to high standards. The menu runs all-day breakfast through lunch and dinner. This is what helped popularize coffee-and-brunch culture in Jakarta. The space is bright, modern, two levels, with exposed concrete and contemporary furnishings. Coffee options cover espresso-based drinks, manual brews, and rotating single-origin offerings.
Common Grounds Ground Zero takes on the night shift. It opened 2021 at Ashta District 8 (staying true to the mall identity here), and was a chance for the founders to experiment beyond the Common Grounds template while keeping the core: excellent coffee, serious food, and a space to gather at all hours. The design leans Japandi, Japanese minimalism meets Scandinavian warmth. Wood, bright colors, and custom rattan furniture create a unique atmosphere. Afterhours, the lighting shifts and Ground Zero reads more like a cocktail bar. The menu expands to include craft cocktails and zero-proof mocktails. It’s a deliberate blur between café and bar, letting the space function from morning espresso through late-night drinks.
Jason Om Leo opened the first Ombe in 2015 in Pluit, North Jakarta, a project turned into an institution. By 2022, Ombe opened the Senopati branch that I visited during World of Coffee. A sleek blue La Marzocco espresso system pulls shots with their Darkside house blend (Brazil, Aceh Gayo, Flores), or alternatively the bean of the month. Single origins rotate through for pour-overs. I was told Om Jason shows up on site regularly, greeting customers, keeping that coffee-family atmosphere alive even as the brand expanded to several locations across town. Behind the bar head barista Herru Limarto was running the show.
Iman Kusumaputra and Putri Yulandari opened the first Kopi Kalyan in 2016 after returning from Melbourne, where they’d spent their university years immersed in the city’s coffee culture. Iman brought a finance background, Putri brought her architecture background, and together with other friends they built a coffee shop designed as a third space, somewhere between home and work, accessible to everyone. The name Kalyan plays on kalian, Indonesian for you all.
Soon after, they started roasting their own beans and began building direct relationships with farmers across Indonesia. The focus stayed local: Indonesian coffees, rare processing methods, experimental lots. By 2020, they’d expanded to Harajuku, Tokyo, and opened additional Jakarta locations. December 2024 brought Kopi Kalyan Archive to Cikajang No. 5, a two-story flagship. The ground floor houses Brew Klub, a dedicated cold brew bar where baristas customize drinks based on your preference. Upstairs, a central coffee bar serves two mezzanine levels filled with seating nooks. The design is more polished than the original but retains warmth through wood accents and open sightlines.
Nathalia Gunawan opened 1/15 Gandaria in June 2012 , bringing Melbourne-style specialty coffee to South Jakarta when the city’s third-wave movement was just beginning. The name comes from her preferred brewing ratio 1:15 coffee to water, which she considers the ideal extraction formula. Well, she seems to believe in it enough to stake her entire brand on it. The Gandaria location set the template for other One Fifteenth locations to open around the city (like Menteng and Kemang, just to name a few). Wooden-minimal interiors, exposed concrete, wood paneling, and floor-to-ceiling windows flooding the space with natural light set the tone here. Long communal tables encourage conversation or working on a laptop. One Fifteenth serves single-origin espresso and filter coffee, with a tasting flight option that lets you compare multiple origins side by side.
Shae Macnamara, an Australian Coffee in Good spirits champion, spent seven years building Expat. Roasters into one of Bali’s most respected specialty coffee names before opening a Jakarta location in December 2023. The choice of venue, the 13th floor of Mori Tower on Jalan Jenderal Sudirman, signals ambition. This isn’t a side project, it’s 100 square meters of polished coffee program dropped into Jakarta’s central business district, panoramic city views included. The space brings industrial-cool interiors, concrete, and metal softened by natural light and greenery. The coffee program reflects years of relationship-building with local farmers.
Expat sources over 90 percent of its green beans directly from more than 50 Indonesian producer families, alongside select international lots. Each cup comes with a card detailing origin, processing, and producer. The menu spans espresso (house blend leans chocolatey, ideal for flat whites), manual brews highlighting single origins, and experimental Indonesian microlots. The bar runs an espresso system, and whatever gear suits the extraction goal.
Yozo Otsuki brought Kurasu from Kyoto to Jakarta in 2023, launching first in Senopati before opening Kurasu Kissaten at Jalan Iskandarsyah I No.9 in Melawai just months later. The Japanese jazz kissa tradition centers around atmosphere, low lighting, vinyl turning instead of algorithms, wood everywhere, and coffee prepared with quiet intention. Kurasu Kissaten delivers on all of it.
The interior was designed around sound and light. Wall shelves hold brewing equipment that doubles as acoustic diffusion, scattering sound naturally across the room. A lamp installation bathes everything in warm, indirect light. During the day, it runs as a slow bar. Baristas hand-pour each cup using beans flown in from Kurasu’s Nishijin roastery back in Kyoto. The house blend holds the menu steady while single origins rotate through, mostly light and medium roasts, preserving what made the coffee compelling at origin. You order, settle in and let the analogue records do the rest.
Cornelius Swangga opened the original Kopikina in Tebet as a small neighborhood coffee shop. It’s a modest space, serious about beans, and a training ground for talented baristas. In late 2020, he expanded the concept into KINA at Jalan Birah II in Senopati, a full all-day dining operation. KINA bridges specialty coffee culture with Jakarta’s demand for functional, work-friendly spaces that serve more than espresso. The interior leans into Japanese-Scandinavian minimalism . The back of the space opens to an outdoor seating area.
The coffee program is built around two house blends: Haraka from West Java and Kasablanca, which combines beans from Kerinci and Aceh in North Sumatra. For filter enthusiasts, KINA rotates single origins from across the Indonesian archipelago, Kalimantan, Bali, Papua, each one showcasing regional character.
Einar Kleppe Holthe’s Oslo institution arrived in Jakarta in November 2024, opening inside Ashta District 8 with the same blueprint that’s worked since 1963: mid-century Scandinavian furniture, light-roast coffee by day, craft cocktails by night. Fuglen means bird in Norwegian, and the brand migrates carefully: Tokyo in 2012, Seoul later, now Jakarta. Each location adapts locally while maintaining the core aesthetic: warm wood, vintage leather sofas imported from Norway, straw-textured wallpaper from the Norwegian Icons collection. Against Ashta’s dark stone and glass, the effect is a 1960s Oslo lounge dropped into a South Jakarta mall.
The coffee philosophy is distinctly Nordic with light roasts shipped from Japan that prioritize clarity and aroma over body. For Jakarta drinkers accustomed to darker profiles, this requires adjustment. The signature drink is the Fuglen Shakerato, espresso shaken over ice with brown sugar, served chilled. It’s silky, lightly sweet, and doesn’t bury the coffee’s fruit notes under milk or syrup. Around 4 PM, the bar shifts. The staff who pulled your morning espresso start mixing cocktails, some incorporating coffee.
First Crack was founded in 2019 with the mission to get Indonesians to understand the quality hiding in their own backyards. The brand has grown steadily since. The Jalan Bumi café in South Jakarta offers the clearest introduction to what First Crack does. The space functions as visual storytelling: the floor illustrates different stages of coffee processing, from cherry to green bean to roasted. A curved bar displays single origins from across the archipelago and the roasting machine sits prominently, handling serious volume. Coffee plants outside complete the loop. It operates as roastery, academy, and café simultaneously, while the main roasting facility and training center sit in Sunter, North Jakarta, where the First Crack Academy runs official SCA modules for baristas and coffee professionals.
Giyanti sits directly across from Menteng’s chaotic antique market. The cafe became a cult reference point among Jakarta’s specialty community before the broader public caught on. The space feels part roastery, part old Javanese sitting room with painted brick walls, vintage objects, tiled floors and colorful accents here and there. The courtyard is the ultimate sanctuary. You really do have to come here to experience the unique atmosphere for yourself.