In 2024, I was connecting between flights at Doha’s Hamad International Airport and thought I’d take a walk out to The Orchard, the airport’s then-new indoor forest and tropical garden. Highly recommended if you’re there—it’s as peaceful and relaxing as I can imagine an airport terminal being.

While wandering The Orchard, I noticed something on its periphery I hadn’t seen before: an outpost of Ralph’s Coffee.

I had never even heard of it, and was curious, so walked over to have a look.

Yes, that’s Ralph’s as in Ralph Lauren. Now I was even more curious. A coffee shop from a fashion house? This I had to try.

As an experiment, this could easily have gone wrong. I wouldn’t necessarily expect a fashion brand to do even a decent job at coffee. But Ralph Lauren has always been less a clothing label than a total lifestyle proposition: urban shopping, country houses, polo fields, tweed, denim, leather, club chairs, teddy bears, and Americana. Coffee fits that world well—very well, actually.

It was the Middle East, so something iced sounded nice—an iced café mocha.

As I awaited my drink, it’s not that my expectations were low, but they weren’t high, either.

And then I tasted the best café mocha I’d ever had. Most examples of that drink lean too heavily on the mocha, not enough on the café, and go overly sweet. This was none of that. It wasn’t like an iced hot chocolate with a slight hint of coffee; it was like an iced café latte with a serious hint of chocolate—and dark chocolate at that.

I asked the person I was traveling with to try my drink and tell me if I was being too kind. Maybe it was the jet lag? No; it was the best café mocha they’d ever had as well.

Since then, I’ve visited other Ralph’s Coffee locations in Asia, Europe, and North America, and each time I’ve been impressed. I especially recommend their coffee flavor soft serve ice cream; like their café mocha, it’s made with their signature Ralph’s Roast, and is heavier on the coffee and lighter on the chocolate than is typical. Think soft serve for adults.

As of this writing, Ralph’s Coffee’s locations include:

Asia: Bangkok, Beijing, Doha, Dubai, Hong Kong, Kuala Lumpur, Kyoto, Nagoya, Osaka, Riyadh, Seoul, Shanghai, Shenzhen, Singapore, Tokyo, Wuhan, and Yokohama.

Europe: Barcelona, Berlin, London, München, Oxford, and Paris.

North America: Boston, Chicago, Manhasset, McLean, Miami, Newport Beach, New York City, Palo Alto, and Woodbury.

It’s easy to be cynical about the concept of a fashion maison coffee house. A logo on a cup doesn’t make the coffee any better, and in fact could all too easily become a substitute for actual quality. The history of luxury brand extensions isn’t always a pleasant read.

What makes Ralph’s Coffee work is that it feels at home in the Ralph Lauren universe, as if it were always there. The brand sells a fantasy of elevated American life: a pied-à-terre in Manhattan and a country house an hour away, where the women are naturally beautiful sophisticates and the men are ruggedly handsome urbanites. (Dazzling, even.) If you think about it like that, high-quality coffee fits right in.

And when the coffee is actually good—when the mocha tastes more like coffee than candy, when the soft serve is adult rather than childish—the exercise stops feeling like brand extension and starts feeling like hospitality.

That’s the unexpected joy of Ralph’s Coffee.

At some point, I’m going to write a longer article on luxury maisons getting into the coffee house business, because it’s not just Ralph Lauren, and now I’m curious. Stay tuned.

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