Small-batch beans and drip bags feature at Cupping Room Coffee Roasters, a Hong Kong coffee business established in 2011. Fook Ming Tong Tea Shop offers tea-master-blended Chinese teas, with Anxi Tie Guan Yin among its named varieties and tastings available by appointment. Yixing and Jingdezhen teaware accompany the tea selection, giving the same house a range of brewing vessels. At LockCha Tea House, loose-leaf pu-erh and oolong are served with vegetarian dim sum at Hong Kong Park and Tai Kwun.
Kenneth Shoji's Japanese chain reached Hong Kong in 2017 with flagship cafés at the Star Ferry Terminal and the IFC Mall. Each pours single-origin espresso under the brand's line, 'See the World Through Coffee.'
Best for Single-origin espresso and minimalist Japanese-style coffee bars
% Arabica was founded by Kenneth Shoji, who opened the brand's flagship store in Kyoto's Higashiyama district in 2014 — a location the company still treats as its global headquarters. The brand arrived in Hong Kong in 2017 with two flagship cafés opened simultaneously: one inside the Star Ferry Terminal in Tsim Sha Tsui, directly on the harbor crossing used by the historic ferry service, and a second in the IFC Mall in Central. % Arabica's own site frames its identity around a stated philosophy, 'See the World Through Coffee,' and describes its aim as pairing 'timeless elegant design' with 'quality bespoke coffee' rather than competing primarily on origin rarity or roast technique. The company has since grown into what it calls the fastest-growing specialty coffee brand globally, expanding largely through franchise partnerships rather than company-owned stores, reaching over two hundred locations worldwide by the mid-2020s. For a visitor to the Star Ferry location specifically, the distinguishing detail isn't the coffee recipe — % Arabica's espresso format is consistent across its global locations — but the site itself: a design-forward café built into one of Hong Kong's most recognizable transit landmarks, part of the brand's original 2017 entry into the territory.
Cupping Room Coffee Roasters opened in 2011, early enough to count among the pioneers of Hong Kong's specialty coffee scene before the city had much of one.
Best for Small-batch roasted beans, capsules, and drip bags
Cupping Room Coffee Roasters opened in 2011, early enough to count among the pioneers of Hong Kong's specialty coffee scene before the city had much of one. The shop roasts in small batches locally, keeping production close to where it's sold rather than importing pre-roasted stock.
Beans, capsules, and drip bags move through its own e-shop as well as Hong Kong supermarket shelves, a retail spread that put specialty-grade coffee into more everyday shopping trips than a single cafe counter could reach on its own. That retail footprint later extended to Singapore, carrying the same small-batch roasting model into a second market.
Having been there near the start of Hong Kong's specialty coffee history, and having built a retail presence that runs from its own shop through supermarket aisles to a Singapore outpost, Cupping Room remains one of the more established names for drinkers in the city looking for locally roasted beans rather than imported roasts.
IFC Central, Harbour City TST, multiple HK locations
Founded in Hong Kong in 1987, Fook Ming Tong blends green, white, oolong, black, dark and floral teas under its own tea masters at shops in ifc mall, Harbour City, Sogo and the airport, pairing them with Yixing and Jingdezhen teaware and tea-tasting appointments.
Best for Traditional Anxi Tie Guan Yin and other tea-master-blended Chinese teas
Founded in 1987, Fook Ming Tong has built its retail footprint around Hong Kong's own high-traffic geography - shops in ifc mall in Central, Ocean Centre at Harbour City in Tsim Sha Tsui, Sogo in Causeway Bay, and a counter at Hong Kong International Airport - putting the tea in front of both local buyers and travelers passing through. The house sources and blends across six major tea categories - green, white, oolong, black, dark and floral - under its own tea masters' quality control, with particular emphasis on traditional Anxi Tie Guan Yin, sold loose or pressed into cakes for aged dark teas. Seasonal releases such as a 2026 spring collection bring in named varieties like Wuyi Da Hong Pao, Anxi Tie Guan Yin and Shifeng Long Jing. The tea list is paired deliberately with teaware - Yixing purple clay pots and Jingdezhen porcelain - and rounded out with a small line of tea-infused almond cookies, plus curated gift sets aimed at corporate and personal gifting alike. Fook Ming Tong also runs private tea-tasting appointments and wholesale accounts, and ships internationally through its own e-commerce platform, extending a nearly four-decade-old Hong Kong tea business well beyond its four physical counters.
Founded in 1938 by a Mr. Lam from Chaozhou, Kee Heung Chun is now run by the third generation from Kennedy Town. It stocks 100+ loose-leaf teas, including aged pu-erh and Phoenix oolong, and supplies Hong Kong's five-star hotels.
Best for 100-plus teas including aged pu-erh and Phoenix oolong
Kee Heung Chun has run as a Chaozhou-style tea house since 1938, founded by a Mr. Lam from Chaozhou and now in its third generation of family management from a small shopfront at 30A Belcher's Street in Kennedy Town. The retail side carries more than 100 varieties of loose-leaf tea, including aged pu-erh, Wuyi and Phoenix oolong, jasmine green tea and rarer vintage lots, with tastings offered before purchase and portions sold as small as 50 grams for anyone wanting to sample rather than commit to a full tin. Wholesale is a substantial part of the business alongside the counter trade: the shop supplies five-star hotels, fine-dining restaurants, private clubs and catering operations across Hong Kong, putting its tea on menus well beyond Kennedy Town. Gift sets and festive hampers round out the retail side for customers buying to give rather than to drink themselves. What stands out most in visitor accounts is the owner's own role at the counter - generous with tasting pours and with explaining what separates one grade or vintage from another, running the shop as an education in Chaozhou gongfu tea culture as much as a retail transaction. For a business now well into its ninth decade, that direct, unhurried counter experience has stayed intact even as the wholesale side has grown around it.
LockCha has sourced small-batch Chinese teas from remote growing regions since 2003 at its Hong Kong Park flagship, adding a Tai Kwun location in 2018. Both pair loose-leaf pu-erh and oolong with an all-vegetarian dim sum menu, recognized among the world's best vegetarian restaurants.
Best for Loose-leaf pu-erh, oolong and vegetarian dim sum
LockCha Tea House has run its flagship location inside Hong Kong Park's gardens and lotus ponds since 2003, near the K.S. Lo Gallery of tea ware, with a second teahouse added at Tai Kwun in Central in 2018. The company traces further back to an earlier tea shop, and describes its buying approach as covering the full chain from plantation to packaging — weighing growing region, climate, and a grower's own care alongside the finished leaf — to source small-batch Chinese teas from remote producing areas rather than buying at volume from brokers. The menu runs to more than 100 teas, pu-erh and oolong prominent among them, served loose-leaf in traditional settings furnished with carved wood panels and calligraphy. What distinguishes LockCha from a typical Chinese teahouse is the kitchen: both locations serve an entirely vegetarian dim sum menu built to pair with the tea list rather than function as a separate restaurant. That pairing has drawn outside recognition, including a spot among American Express Essentials' picks for the world's best vegetarian restaurants and coverage from Condé Nast Traveler and AFAR — an unusual crossover for a business that started as a tea merchant rather than a restaurant.
NOC brands itself "coffee meets design." The Hong Kong roaster serves in-house-roasted espresso and pour-over inside deliberately minimalist, design-forward spaces, including its Graham Street original.
Best for Design-forward espresso from the original 2015 Graham Street roastery, Wallpaper*-recognized
NOC -- short for "Not Only Coffee" -- opened its first cafe on the slopes of Graham Street in Hong Kong's Soho district in 2015, founded by 2011 Hong Kong Barista Champion Chan Chak Sum and F&B veteran Benny Leung. The name states the founders' intent directly: they wanted spaces that paired serious espresso with design and food, rather than a coffee counter alone. That approach earned recognition beyond Hong Kong -- Wallpaper* magazine named NOC one of the "World's Top Coffee Shops for Design Lovers" in 2018, and it has also appeared on international best-coffee-shop lists compiled by outlets including Big Seven Travel. Leung was separately recognized as an Outstanding Young Entrepreneur in the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area awards for the brand's cultural-creativity work. From the original Graham Street site, NOC has expanded to roughly half a dozen Hong Kong locations plus a Bangkok outlet, all built on the same bright, minimalist template and an in-house roasting program. The Graham Street cafe remains the brand's reference point: a small-footprint, design-forward espresso bar on Central's steep market streets, credited with helping set the tone for Hong Kong's third-wave coffee scene through the second half of the 2010s.
Hong Kong's pioneering specialty roaster, opened in Causeway Bay in November 2012 by Jennifer W.F. Liu. Ranked Hong Kong's top specialty coffee brand by Frost & Sullivan in 2017.
Best for Hong Kong's first specialty roaster, opened by Jennifer Liu in 2012.
The Coffee Academics traces back to 2010, when its founder, Jennifer W.F. Liu, opened a training studio in Causeway Bay meant as a space for the city's small but growing community of specialty coffee drinkers. Liu wasn't new to the trade — she'd already opened Caffè Habitu in 2003 — but the studio was aimed less at selling coffee than at teaching it.
The retail side followed in November 2012, with the first café opening at 38 Yiu Wa Street in Causeway Bay, built around the same idea: coffee education as much as coffee sales. It worked. Within five years, Frost & Sullivan ranked The Coffee Academics first in specialty coffee in Hong Kong for 2017, and the company has since expanded past 55 outlets across Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines — a rare case of a coffee-education project scaling into a regional chain without losing the original teaching bent.
Founding branch in Yuen Long, multiple HK locations
Wing Wah opened as a Yuen Long tea house and bakery in 1950, launching its defining white lotus seed paste mooncake in 1963 as the first to use vegetable oil instead of lard. It now runs 50-plus outlets making mooncakes, wedding cakes and preserved sausage.
Best for It now runs 50-plus outlets making mooncakes, wedding cakes and preserved sausage
Wing Wah opened in 1950 in a four-story building in Yuen Long that combined a bakery with a retail shop selling mooncakes, founded by Lau Pui Ling and a partner, with the business formally incorporated in 1962. Its defining product came the following year: in 1963 Wing Wah launched a white lotus seed paste mooncake made with vegetable oil rather than the lard traditionally used in Cantonese pastry, a formula credited as the first of its kind and one that much of the wider mooncake market later followed. The company has expanded from that single Yuen Long shop into more than 50 outlets across Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories, backed by its own manufacturing plant, and now sells beyond the original white lotus seed mooncake into icy and molten varieties, Chinese wedding cakes, preserved sausage, and a broader run of cakes, cookies and tea. Its own count puts its developed recipe library above 1,000, most still tied to a seasonal, small-batch production schedule built around festivals rather than year-round volume manufacturing. Wing Wah ships internationally, including to Macau, mainland China, Taiwan, the US, Australia and New Zealand, extending a Yuen Long tea house's reach well past Hong Kong.
Ying Kee Tea House was founded in 1881 by Chen Chao Ying in Guangzhou, more than a century before Hong Kong became its home.
Best for Pu-erh, oolong and jasmine teas from an 1881 Guangzhou house
Ying Kee Tea House was founded in 1881 by Chen Chao Ying in Guangzhou, more than a century before Hong Kong became its home. The business relocated to Hong Kong in 1950, in the wave of southward migration around the founding of the People's Republic, and has operated there continuously since — now run by the fourth generation of Chen's family, with nine shops spread across Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, and the New Territories.
Over 140 years of continuous trading has come with formal recognition alongside the reputation: Ying Kee holds Hong Kong's Top Brand Mark, ISO9001 certification, and a place in the government's Quality Tourism Services Scheme, plus a Hong Kong Quality Food Award in 2013. The house's range runs across pu-erh, oolong, jasmine, green, and white teas, selected by in-house tea masters, alongside its own teaware.
Few Hong Kong tea houses can point to a founding that predates the city's own status as a British colony's commercial hub by decades — Ying Kee's history began in Guangzhou and only became a Hong Kong story once the family moved the business south in 1950, a relocation now itself 75 years in the past.
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