Cape Town for digital nomads

Best cafes

Cape Town's cafe scene is a working city's scene, not a set piece for visitors. It clusters hardest along Breë Street in the CBD, where three of the addresses below sit within a few hundred metres of each other, and then thins out honestly as you move through Gardens, Oranjezicht, Green Point, and out toward Hout Bay, Durbanville, Kuils River, Khayelitsha, Strand, and Gordon's Bay. What ties the list together is not a single house style but a shared discipline about hours: most of these rooms open by 07:00 or 08:00 and close by mid-afternoon, because their regulars are commuters and neighbours, not brunch tourists. The 12 cafes below were chosen because each one earns its address, whether that address is a corner shopfront on Breë Street or a shop unit on the Strand pavilion. Skip the harbour-front chains selling the postcard; the coffee people in this city drink is served in rooms like these, and often before you have finished your first meeting of the day.