Brief (coffeeyo.com): In Nanjing’s outskirts, landscape cafés “grown” beside lakes and quarries are quietly rewriting how suburban scenic spots are opened—small investment, short cycle, but longer dwell time, hotter secondary spending, and a bundled “activity package” of tickets and hikes. A cup of coffee is brewing the “new flavor” of near-city cultural-tourism transformation.
Since this year, suburban attractions such as Jiangsu Garden Expo Park and Lishui Wuxiang Mountain have leveraged their own distinctive scenery to build characteristic coffee shops.
These landscape cafés that “grow” beside lakes and quarry pits have become one reason visitors make a special trip to the spots. They require small investment and a short cycle, yet lengthen visitors’ stay, ignite secondary spending, and string together an “activity package” of tickets and hiking. A cup of coffee is quietly changing how Nanjing’s near-suburb attractions are opened, brewing the “new flavor” of near-suburb cultural-tourism transformation.
A “new name card” for suburban attractions
“Take a photo of me with the cable car, then we’ll sit and have coffee while we wait for the sunset.” Yesterday afternoon, at the “Cement Silo Coffee” in Jiangsu Garden Expo Park, visitor Zhang Jingru and her friend were taking pictures on the terrace. Looking out from the terrace, a red cable car glides slowly by like a string of flowing beads, dotting the rolling green hills.
Store manager Wang Bin explained that the cement silo has distinctive features, and the terrace outside the silo offers excellent mountain views. Relying on the building’s own character, the café set up a dedicated sunset-atmosphere terrace and a forest-light-art check-in installation, and became a new internet-famous spot right after opening. “We wanted to create a relaxing atmosphere that fits young people’s preferences. Many saw our shop on social platforms and came specially to check in; on the first weekend after opening we sold over 200 cups of coffee in a single day,” Wang said.
A cup of coffee, thus quietly changed how near-suburb attractions are opened. And stories like this are playing out across Nanjing.
The lens turns to Lishui, where the trial-run “Sky Pool Coffee” has already gone viral on social platforms. “Sky Pool Coffee” sits by the pond atop Wuxiang Mountain, with a nearly 200-meter ring-shaped viewing corridor and an open view—look up to see the azure Sky Pool and bamboo waves rolling like the sea.
The same heat is spreading through Nanjing’s Laoshan National Forest Park. Not long ago, the newly opened “Shan Liaoliao” café fused coffee leisure with the stream; adults hold cups sitting on the bank while children roll up their trousers and splash happily in the water, and on busy weekends ordering a coffee means a half-hour wait.
The precise alliance of scenery and coffee
In the view of Yin Hong, general manager of Nanjing Lishui Wuxiang Mountain Cultural Tourism Development Co., the scenic area has irreplaceable scenery while the café has a natural lingering attribute and a dissemination gene; opening a café in a suburban attraction is not following a trend but a precise supply-demand match.
As a national forest park, Wuxiang Mountain is rich in flora and fauna, with attractions such as pine forests and bamboo seas, and a forest coverage rate as high as 95.6%.
To let more visitors enter this forest and feel its deep historical and cultural heritage, since June this year Yin Hong has led the team to conceive the café, personally handling interior design renovation and outdoor scene atmosphere, setting up multiple check-in points so visitors can experience Wuxiang’s relaxed state of mind in a unique environment. “What a scenic area truly lacks has never been ‘a place to sell things,’ but a reason for visitors to ‘stop,'” Yin said.
Stringing together the scenic “activity package”
What a café brings is far more than a drink. Once inside the scenic area, it is quietly stringing together the area’s “activity package.”
At Nanjing’s Laoshan National Forest Park, during its early operation “Shan Liaoliao” launched a 78-yuan double ticket covering Laoshan National Forest Park admission, the Hundred-Birds Garden ticket and two drinks; a single Douyin link alone sold over 3,000 tickets. On social platforms, many bloggers’ Laoshan hiking-route notes weave the in-park café into the route; at “Sky Pool Coffee,” visitors who share the café’s indoor and outdoor scenes on social platforms and get 18 likes receive a 5-yuan drink voucher, and 58 likes can redeem a small dessert. Buying a drink with a Sky Pool ticket also deducts 10 yuan. In future, the café will also link with other Wuxiang Mountain attractions, extending from coffee to hiking, cycling, sightseeing, cultural study tours and cultural-creative experiences.
With a cup of coffee down, visitors’ pace slows. “In the past, visitors came, did the activities and left within two hours. Now many deliberately set aside a few hours to sit in the café and savor life,” the operations head of the Longchumu scenic area told the reporter. After the café opened, average dwell time clearly lengthened and secondary spending rose accordingly. What surprised him more was that many young people walk in and ask where the café is, coming specially to check it in, while rafting becomes a side activity.
Scenery becomes a consumable scene, and dissemination shifts from waiting for guests at the door to actively creating it. The cafés in near-suburb attractions reflect a shift in cultural-tourism operating thinking. A cup of coffee earns visitors a reason to stop, a window for the scenic area to be seen, and a more precise match between cultural-tourism supply and demand—brewing the “new flavor” of cultural-tourism transformation.
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