This post, featuring Ophelia Café, is the ninth in an occasional series about my favorite coffee shops in Joburg. 

Making a great coffee shop is about more than just serving great coffee. In the global indie coffee culture of 2019, coffee shops must also have style. They must be bright and Instagrammable, in a cool but unlikely location, with pretty tableware and light fixtures. The food must be good. The servers must be attentive and friendly, preferably with tattoos and cool but effortless-looking hairstyles. The furniture must be attractive and comfortable but not too comfortable, as customers need to stay awake as they type away at their MacBooks.

Ophelia Café in Emmarentia checks all these boxes.

Ophelia opened a couple of months ago in this funny, retro little shopping center/apartment cluster at the corner of 5th Avenue and Thomas Bowler Street (just behind the Johannesburg Botanical Gardens) in Emmarentia. I go past this center all the time — it’s a four-minute drive from Melville — and have been waiting for years for something cool to open there. (The fantastic Craft Beer Library, which used to be up the road in Linden, is now at the back of this same center.)

I had coffee at Ophelia for the first time yesterday and couldn’t wait to blog about it.

Coffee at Ophelia

My friend Frances and I had coffee and a light lunch at Ophelia. I’ll let my pictures tell the rest of the story.

Get to Ophelia for your next coffee date. It’s perfect.

Ophelia Café is at Buiding 2A, 5th Avenue, Emmarentia.

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