Brief (coffeeyo.com): In Huaxin Town, Qingpu, Shanghai—where even the suburbs boast Starbucks and Luckin outposts—a small, unpretentious community coffee shop run by Liu Nannan answers the “why bother going out for coffee” question with a counter-commercial credo: good beans roasted in-house, honest craft, and people who don’t cut corners.
Coffee these days is more common than the parcel locker at the entrance to your residential compound.
Shanghai now has over 10,000 coffee shops, and Qingpu is no slouch either—there are cafés in the blocks, in the parks, and in the villages. Huaxin Town alone has three Starbucks and four Luckin outlets, plus a pile of independent little shops tucked deep inside office buildings or at the end of alleyways, places your navigation app has to loop around once to find.
But here’s the question: grinders, semi-automatics, timers, online tutorials—the whole internet will teach you for free. The espresso many people pull at home no longer looks like “practice”; it looks like “content for the feed.” So why do people still go out for a cup?
This little Huaxin shop gives a rather “anti-commercial” answer.
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She used to develop flavored sauces; now she “flavors” coffee.
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Liu Nannan, born in Anhui and raised in Shanghai, grew up in Huaxin Town. Before opening the shop she worked in video-based flavored-sauce development. Later she fell for coffee—went off to study, to get certified, to visit the growing regions in Yunnan to see the beans herself. Back in Huaxin, she opened a small shop that is not big, not an internet sensation, and doesn’t rely on lavish decor: community coffee plus home-style coffee, beans roasted in-house, with dirty coffee and pour-over as her signature skills.
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A regular customer put it bluntly: “Liu Nannan makes it taste good—better than the ones downtown even.” Said downtown, that would get you accused of “small-town tinted glasses.” But anyone who’s tasted it knows: it wasn’t the decoration that won, it was the person not cutting corners.
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In such a cutthroat industry, she keeps people with things that “don’t make money.”
How cutthroat is opening a coffee shop nowadays? A 9.9-yuan cup is no longer news. Home espresso machines understand young people better than a rice cooker does. Liu Nannan didn’t compete on how fancy her signature drinks’ names sounded, nor did she wear the word “specialty” on her sleeve. She has done a few things that would make any accountant wince:
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