Iranian Cafés

An Iranian café in Germany is a place to sit rather than a place to eat. Nobody comes to be fed. They come to spend a few hours somewhere Persian is spoken, with a glass of tea in front of them and no need to buy something new every quarter of an hour to earn the right to stay. What you are paying for is the time.

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The tea, which is why most people are here

The tea does not come out of a bag. Loose leaf steeps in a pot, the pot sits on a samovar or over a kettle to hold its heat, and it is poured into a narrow-waisted glass rather than a mug. You can ask for it dark, or weak and opened up with hot water at the table. Several things arrive beside the glass that a German café has no equivalent for:

• Nabat, the saffron rock sugar: a crystal stick you stir with and can just as well suck on. It replaces the sugar cube and changes the taste too.
• Dates and sugar lumps: depending on the place you get dates, dried mulberries or hard sugar, held in the mouth to drink the tea through rather than dissolved in the glass.
• Herbal infusions: saffron and cardamom tea, sour tea, orange blossom, which is the shelf to ask about after dark.
• The refill: in some places tea comes as a pot that is topped up as long as you sit; in others every glass is charged separately. Ask at the start, because over a long afternoon those add up very differently.

There is coffee too, and the European menu is intact

Almost none of these cafés pour tea alone. There is an espresso machine, cappuccino and filter coffee, and cake on the counter, as a good share of the customers are German-speaking neighbours and a Persian family often splits down the middle anyway. If it is your first visit, order the tea: that is what these places are judged on.

What comes with the cup, and why the afternoon costs less

A café is not a restaurant kitchen. What is usually there, depending on the place:

• Pastry: dry Persian biscuits, baklava, cream puffs and roulades, and in their season zoolbia and bamieh.
• Ice cream and faloodeh: in summer the saffron ice cream and the rosewater noodle sorbet are half the reason people walk in, and neither is a year round certainty.
• Something small and hot: ash, morning haleem, kotlet, a sandwich, an omelette. This is where the places differ most, since a fair few have no kitchen at all.

The part that rarely gets said out loud: a small plate with tea in the afternoon costs a fraction of dinner. For a student, or anyone counting euros in a new country, a café is the cheapest route back to a familiar taste, not the most expensive. If you only want sweets to carry home, bakeries and sweet shops are their own category, and for a plate at a table go to the restaurants.

The other half of a café, which no menu mentions

Rented flats in German cities are small, and plenty of people have no room to invite anyone into. The café is the living room you do not have, and much of what these places provide has nothing to do with food:

• Meetings that will not fit at home: a friend, a new acquaintance, the conversation that does not work over the phone.
• Study and work: laptops are common on weekday afternoons, but ask about sockets and wifi first, since not every room is built for a three hour sit.
• Backgammon and cards: in many of these places a board is open on a table and a card game is running; the boards belong either to the café or to the players.
• Arriving new: if you have just moved and know nobody, this is the closest thing to an open door. Read the noticeboard by the entrance, where classes, rooms to let and concerts go up first.
• Evenings with something on: poetry nights, live music, film screenings, the dates in the Iranian calendar. That rarely reaches a website; it goes on the board or on their Instagram, so ask.

The hours run later, and the evening is when the room fills

A German café often closes in the late afternoon. An Iranian one usually runs into the evening, and its rhythm goes the other way: quiet in the afternoon, which suits work and a conversation between two people, then full and loud from early evening, which is what you want if you came to see faces. Choose your hour by what you came to do, and check the last train before you settle in, since a café that closes late only helps if you can get home.

Shisha: only the café can answer that one

Some of these places offer shisha and some do not, and a photo gallery will not tell you. Whether it can be smoked indoors at all depends on the smoking law of that federal state and on the room itself, and those rules differ from one Bundesland to the next and have changed over the years. So neither this page nor the profiles below it can settle it. Phone and ask three things: whether they have it; whether it is indoors or only on the terrace; and, if you are bringing a child, whether there is a smoke free area.

The list here is short, so you may have to travel

Iranian cafés in Germany are few and thinly spread, and there may well be none in your own town. That is a different problem from restaurants: you can travel once a month for a good dinner, but a café only earns its place when you can reach it on an unplanned free afternoon. So take the city list on this page as the map rather than your own guess, and if your town is not on it, look to the next large city, whether that is Köln, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt or Hamburg. If you are making the trip once, go in the evening, the hour these places are most themselves.

What to ask when you phone, or when you walk in

• How late they are open tonight, and whether weekend evenings differ.
• Whether tea comes as a pot or by the glass, and whether refills are charged.
• Whether there is anything hot to eat, and whether ice cream and faloodeh are on this season.
• Whether shisha is on offer, and if so indoors or outside.
• If you are coming to work: sockets, wifi, and whether a long sit is a problem at busy times.
• If your group is large: whether they hold a big table, and what is on that night.
• YabInfy checks none of this, so ask for it yourself, and ask to see the document where it matters.

Reading the profiles, and what stays private

Judge a café review by whether it describes the room. That nobody rushed them once the tea was finished, that Saturday noise makes conversation impossible, that there are only a handful of tables: all of that is worth more to you than an opinion about one pastry, and even "it was empty" may be exactly what you were looking for.

YabInfy keeps no record of whose profile you opened or whose number you looked at, and the owner has no such list either. The one thing that stays visible to other people is the review you choose to write, under whatever name you pick for it. Each address and number sits behind "Show contact details", and you make the call yourself.

The rest of the eating and drinking categories are gathered on the food and drink page, how the site itself works is set out in the FAQ, and if the café is yours, add your business.