The First Coffee House in Dhaka: What We Actually Know

 

There is a rather tempting story about coffee in Dhaka.

Go looking for the city's first coffee house and, before long, you encounter claims of a little coffee house on a hill in Ramna, perhaps two centuries ago. It is the sort of detail that feels wonderfully plausible: colonial Dhaka, a green corner of Ramna, Europeans drinking coffee and escaping the heat.

The problem is that history doesn't become true simply because it makes a good story.

What we can establish with considerably more confidence is that coffee was already being consumed in Dhaka by 1682. An account associated with the East India Company agent William Hedges records coffee being served to him in Dhaka during his dealings with the Mughal administration.

That is fascinating—but it isn't evidence of a coffee house.

And this distinction matters.

A cup of coffee served in a Mughal official's residence tells us that coffee had reached Dhaka's elite circles. It doesn't tell us that someone had opened a public establishment where people could buy coffee, sit for an hour and argue about politics.

The much-repeated Ramna coffee-house story is therefore best treated as a historical lead rather than a settled fact. A later account claims that a coffee house existed on a hill in Ramna roughly two hundred years ago, but the contemporary document that would allow us to identify its name, owner, location and business model has not yet been established.

Then the story becomes quieter.

Dhaka's great gathering places were generally not coffee houses in the European sense. Madhur Canteen, established in 1921, became an extraordinary centre of political and intellectual life. Later establishments such as Cafe Corner, dating from the early 1960s, formed part of an older café and restaurant culture.

People gathered. They talked. They argued. They ate.

But the drink that defined everyday Bangladeshi social life was overwhelmingly tea.

This is perhaps the most interesting part of the story. Dhaka did not need a coffee house to develop an adda culture. The social function that we associate with the great European coffee houses existed perfectly well elsewhere—over tea, food, cigarettes and conversation.

The modern coffee shop arrived much later.

Commercial café culture began to develop in Dhaka during the 2000s, and then, in 2011, North End Coffee Roasters opened and helped introduce something rather different: not simply coffee as a fashionable drink, but specialty coffee as a product whose origin, roasting and preparation mattered.

And that is where I think the history becomes particularly interesting.

Because perhaps the wrong question is:

"What was Dhaka's first coffee house?"

A better question might be:

"When did coffee change from something people drank into something people cared about?"

The first answer may take us back to 1682.

The second takes us much closer to the present.

And somewhere between those two dates is the much more complicated, and much more interesting, history of coffee in Dhaka.