Pandemic Coffee

If the cold brew at Pandemic Coffee doesn’t keep you awake, everything else certainly will.
Stepping through the front doors at 2am into a cavernous, industrial interior blasting with loud techno music – but full of paradoxically serene cherry blossom trees and bronze deer statues – Pandemic’s commitment to being the “most different brand” in Saudi Arabia quickly becomes clear.

Every part of the venue reveals a new twist, from a spaceship-style glass dome housing a nitro coffee bar (complete with fog machines) to the wacky presentation of the dishes (one involves a plastic mannequin head with a wig made of candy floss), the whole thing is absolute madness.

But, like everyone else who has had the fortune of paying this epic Insta-spot a visit, we just can’t get enough.

Rather than making a beeline for the door, after being handed our iced Spanish latte and cookie dough bites by the boilersuit-wearing staff, we find ourselves gravitating towards a renaissance-style lazy chair.

There’s no menu on each table – instead, there’s a business prospectus laying out the vision of entrepreneur and founder Abdulaziz Bin Faris, who wants to create the ultimate coffee experience through the “perfect blend of art and science”.

Over the next 20 minutes, we can’t put it down. We learn the story behind Pandemic, involving a mythical beast raising an orphan child before planting trees and turning the resulting berries into coffee. We find out about the detailed and rigorous testing process that signature roasts go through before being brewed on-site.

And we discover that, among all the madness, Pandemic Coffee is ultimately based on a genius vision to offer late-night Riyadh a place to guzzle coffee (and the café’s signature Red Bull mixed drinks) well into the early hours.

If you haven’t been yet, go.