Mallik Thatipalli

Hyderabad was pretty well known for sticking it out for tea over coffee for many, many years. Coffee tried for ages to elbow its way into the landscape but failed miserably – impressive, actually, given that the city sits so close to Karnataka, which produces most of the coffee in India. But all that changed in the 2000s. The big IT boom brought hordes of caffeine-crazed folks to town, and back then, there was only the humble-but-sturdy Café Coffee Day that valiantly kept up with the demand. Coffee became a main character after playing side fiddle to tea for years, and today, it’s earned loyalty from the cityfolk in its own right – there’s a coffee shop hawking specialty coffee every hundred metres as a testament to that fact. The city’s finally grown snobbish about good coffee, and about time, I say.  The cafés themselves are rather a lot more avant-garde than could be expected from a city that appears, on the outset, as sleepy and laid-back as Hyderabad. In recent years, I’ve seen the rise of cosy nooks that recall the misty hills of their owners’ homelands, and I’ve seen minimalist micro-roasters with wonderfully inventive menus that challenge how we drink our daily coffee. I’ve cantered through them all, and this guide covers the best of the lot. 

Durgam Cheruvu Lake is to Hyderabad what Central Park is to New York, and LastHouse has capitalised on that fact with gleeful audacity. The result of that freewheeling entrepreneurial decision is a café that somehow manages to pull off the impossible: great views and good coffee that doesn’t taste like it was brewed yesterday. Actually, that’s a massive understatement. LastHouse doesn’t just do good coffee. It does great coffee. The beans are all robusta, sourced straight from a 400-acre estate in Sakleshpura, in the neighbouring state of Karnataka. This happens to be very much the point of the entire venture – signboards at the coffee station inform me that robusta, incidentally, is a a more ‘climate-smart’ coffee able to withstand higher temperatures, and LastHouse is one of the few places that exclusively serves robusta over arabica, its stressier cousin.  After all that, the coffee’d better be good. And it is. The Vietnamese Iced Coffee gets the strong coffee to sweet milk ratio just right. The Strawberry Mazagran (coffee with lemon and strawberry) is fantastic in summer, and the Salted Popcorn Caramel Frappe – one of the more decadent items on the menu – is a genuine must-try. If you’re looking for an elevated classic, the Last House Special Cappuccino’s got it down pat.Surprisingly, the food menu is imbued with a personality of its own, and doesn’t fall into the category of café food that entails dry reheated bready nonsense that tastes absolutely mediocre. Sandwiches t

What’s immediately clear about an institution called Roast Coffee Culinary Xperience (shortened, mercifully, to Roast CCX) is that it’s made by coffee snobs for coffee snobs. How could it not? It’s a mindboggling 60,000 square feet of coffee territory. And that’s shocking, given that it’s located in the prime neighbourhood of Banjara Hills.  You can rightly imagine that there’s no chance in hell Roast CCX would draw the line at just serving coffee. Nope – the place can house up to 500 people at a time. It’s got a private screening room, a coffee lab for nerds who know what crema and bloom ratios are, and even a hire-your-own-chef setup for intimate dinner parties. It’s an obnoxious Disneyland for grown-ups who love coffee, spread across multiple levels, both indoors and outdoors.  What’s really surprising, then, is that for all its fancifulness, the heart of Roast CCX is really quite simple: to serve good coffee. And they pull it off with a beautiful, respectable consistency. The proof’s in the pudding: usual suspects like cappuccinos, cortados, espressos and lattes are faultless, and the inventive stuff on the menu tastes like time and effort went into them. Take the Lotus Biscoff Latte, which is a great entry point for starters. It’s subtly crunchy, the caramelly spiciness of the biscuits is blended to a perfect consistency, and the best part’s that it isn’t overly sweet. The cold brews are genuinely fantastic: I’d get the Tender Coconut, Bailey’s Irish Cream, and Apple Cin

It’s not hard to guess why Hyderabadis love True Black. Maybe it was the gentle flirtation with flavours that the city had never seen paired with coffee before. Maybe it was the Japandi-style interiors. Maybe it was the fact that it grew from one to five outlets in just under three years. True Black was, essentially, one of the first big explorations of third-wave coffee culture in Hyderabad, and that’s got to strike some type of chord.It’s got brewing veteran – and founder – Rohit Chennamaneni’s hands all over it. The Valencia Orange Coffee’s bright, clean, and slightly rebellious. The Vanilla Cold Brew’s smoothly sophisticated, and the Espresso Tonic delivers a sharp, slightly unexpected, fizzy jolt. Even the more fusion-esque items work, somehow. The Coco Matcha’s a holiday in a cup and the Brookie (brownie-meets-espresso-meets-ice-cream) might ruin a dessert version elsewhere. It’d be disappointing if the food wasn’t up to the mark, but thankfully, it is. They’ve got lots of  classic items like the Ham and Cheese Croissant Sandwich, which are all done well, but a particularly great item on the menu’s the Black Hummus Toast, which features a lush mushroom-hummus mix.