How to Pick Up Girls in Coffee Shops & Cafés

I have spent quite a bit of time in cafés and coffee shops over the years. That happens when you run an Internet business and do not have a traditional office-building office.

The right coffee shop/café is great for meeting attractive, cool girls at – but you need to know what you’re doing.

I have seen guys fumbling around trying to be very direct with girls in coffee shops. This only makes things awkward. I have also seen a lot of guys who fall for a barista and get focused on trying to ask out their favorite coffee brewer; they see her every time and gradually fall in love with her and get oneitis.

This guide is not on any of that stuff. This is not a “how to do tons of volume hitting on women in coffee shops” guide. Nor is this a guide to “how to pick up your favorite barista” (if you’re looking for something like that, check out my guide to picking up waitresses).

Instead, this is a guide on how to pick up girls in coffee shops and cafés strategically while you are in these places – so you are operating within the ‘rules’ of the venues while not missing out on interested & available girls.

 

Before we plunge into the meat of the guide, there are a few things you need to understand about picking up girls in cafés and coffee shops:

• This is low volume game. Cafés will not replace high volume outlets, like nightclub pickup, online game, or higher volume day game pickup spots. At most, you’ll be meeting 4 to 10 girls per week in cafés (1 or 2 per café visit) – and then only if you’re in cafés and looking to approach almost every day.

• Spamming gets awkward fast. “Hey, I saw you, and this is crazy…” does not fly in a coffee shop. You need to be a lot more careful with direct openers when dealing with captive audiences, and girls in coffee shops are a captive audience. Don’t spam approach in coffee shops; you’ll regret it if you do.

• This is most useful if you’re in cafés a lot. If you’re not someone who goes to cafés, learning how to pick up girls in cafés is probably not worth your time. Low volume + high strategy requirements make this somewhat more challenging game to run. It’s only really useful if you’re in cafés a lot to work, relax, or meet friends (or dates!).

• If you don’t buy anything or otherwise look like you have a reason to be there it looks weird. I know we’ve got guys who are broke as a joke on here and for whom regular Starbucks drinks will break the bank. I have sympathy, and in that case you can always bring a thermos from home with your own drink inside plus bring a laptop and then be typing away sipping from your thermos and it’s okay. But the guys who go to coffee shops and hang around not buying or drinking anything and not really doing anything else but chatting up girls stick out like a sore thumb. You also stand out if you bring, say, some McDonald’s into a Starbucks and don’t buy anything at the Starbucks (why didn’t you just eat at the McDonald’s?). The only way for it to not look weird is if you bring a friend (wingman) and are having a great time with him most of the time, then occasionally talking to girls. Then you’re just two cool guys flouting the norms of being in a drink place without food or drink because you’re awesome. If you lack a wing, and you’re just hanging around staring at chicks and opening, without having a drink or anything really to do, you look like a creeper. You don’t want to look like a creeper.

On the creeper note: just keep in mind, cool guys are guys who “don’t even care” about meeting girls but “just happen” to meet them “incidentally.” Of course, they actually care about meeting girls, but to obey the Law of Least Effort they make it APPEAR effortless. Creepy guys are guys who are very obviously prowling around, hunting for women, with nothing else social, cool, or business-like to do; they are just prowling (which is especially inappropriate in a place like a café).

So, we are aiming to make our approaches look cool, effortless, and incidental, as if we were always going to be there anyway, then just happened to strike up a conversation with this girl as we were there.

For this reason, café pickup and coffee shop pickup are not beginner-friendly avenues for meeting girls. Once a guy is able to be aware of the situation around him and how people are likely perceiving him, and is able to make his approaches in a more effortless-appearing way, he can then start thinking about how to pick up girls in coffee shops and cafés.

That outta the way, let’s get to the guide!

 

All right, time to talk nuts and bolts (and strategy).

This is the stuff you will need to do to pick up girls effectively from coffee shops and cafés.

We have some differences here from our general process for picking up girls – which, if you have not read yet, you should.

READ MORE: How to Start Picking Up Girls (Beginner Guide)

To ensure you are hitting all the right notes, take care to review each of the steps below and don’t go skipping/skimming over the several small-but-important considerations we’ll cover.

 

Step #1: Scout Trendy Cafés

Our first order of business is to find cafés and coffee shops we can actually pick up women in.

Some cafés you’ll go to just attract middle-aged businessmen. Some are empty during the times you go. Some are old people cafés where a bunch of senior citizens go to shoot the breeze (and play bridge I guess?). You’re not going to know until you visit them and spend some time in them.

As you visit different cafés, you will tend to notice that some of them attract more good-looking, trendy women than others. Some (in student areas) attract college-aged girls. Some (nearby to office building complexes) attract young professional women.

You will even find that coffee shops nearby each other can attract different clientele. Coffee Shop A on one side of the mall may consistently attract young, single, good-looking girls, while Coffee Shop B on the other side of the mall may consistently attract frazzled-looking middle-aged women in rumpled business attire. Why do these two different cafés attract different types of women? It’s anyone’s guess, but you will notice they nevertheless DO.

In general, you will find a few different types of cafés/coffee shops:

1. Pass-Through Cafés: most people don’t actually stay here. They just come in to pick up drinks and/or food then keep moving. You might think, “Great, I can meet all the girls picking up their coffee orders!” but it doesn’t work like that. You are not going to stand at the counter hitting on every woman who rushes in to pick up coffee and try to get her number before she rushes back out. You will look like Creep Supreme and the staff will boot you and tell you not to come back. Skip these cafés.

2. “Park and Work” Cafés: these are the cafés and coffee shops where people bring their laptops and park themselves to work for long stretches of time – hours or even most of the day. These cafés are good if you are also a “works in a café” type and so long as the types of girls you like are also parking and working there.

3. Socialize Cafés: these cafés people go to primarily to socialize. You will see friends meeting friends, people meeting for dates, colleagues on coffee breaks, and all manner of small social gatherings. You will also typically see lone wolf girls hanging out sipping on their drinks reading books or their phones. These cafés are great.

You want to look for the socialize cafés and the “park and work” cafés. You want to avoid the pass-through cafés.

Keep in mind as you explore different venues that you are looking for both the type of the coffee shop or café that it is and the clientele. A “park and work” café that is filled with 40-something businessmen and few women is not good. A pass-through café with tons of hot girls streaming in and out of it is also not good (maybe you can figure out where they are streaming in and out from and to before/after they are in the coffee shop and pick them up there instead).

You need the right environment + the right clientele.

You are looking for places with the types of girls you want to meet, where those girls are going to hang around and stay put for a while.

 

Step #2: Meet Girls in Line

You can’t do this at every café – many cafés aren’t busy enough for it.

But at the very busy coffee shops (such as a very busy downtown Starbucks) you may find a long queue of people waiting to put their orders in. This is a prime spot to meet girls in.

Because cafés and coffee shops are low volume, you are not going to have many chances to approach while in them. For that reason, you want to maximize what few opportunities you DO have – this is where strategy comes into play. You can meet a girl in line, then meet another girl or two once you sit.

Your strategy for meeting girls in line in a coffee shop (assuming you are in a coffee shop that has lines) is this:

1. Before you join the queue, check if there’s a girl in front of or behind you. If you’ll be lining up behind a good-looking girl, or there’s one following right behind you as you head to the line, then queue up. You can talk to her once you’re in line.

2. If no girl will be in front of or behind you, don’t queue up just yet. Instead, be ‘distracted’: walk over to check out the pastries in the display case. Stand there out of line staring at the drinks menu. Peer around at the seating area to scope out the situation with the seats. Keep yourself ‘distracted’ until a cutie walks in and gets in line. Then, after a moment, finish gazing at your distraction and go line up behind her.

3. Open with sitrel or slow opening. Situationally relevant openers are perfect in coffee shop queues (“Just escaped from the office?” “So, you gonna try that new pumpkin mocha spice supernova or whatever that thing is?”). If it’s a longer, slower moving line, you can also use slow opening for a more gradual, natural easing into of the conversation.

If there’s no line, or the line is very short (e.g., only one or two people ahead of you), you usually will not be meeting girls in line. But hey, keep your feelers out anyway – every now and then you’ll line up with a guy ordering at the counter, a single girl between you and him, and she’ll be glancing at you and brushing her hair back – open her anyway, even if it’ll be her turn to order in a minute!

If it goes well with a girl you meet in line, ask whether she’s drinking there or heading back to work or school. If she’s leaving, take her contact info. If she’s staying, and the vibe is good, tell her whoever gets out of line first grabs the seats for you two. Now it’s an instant date.

 

Step #3: Don’t Make the Barista Your Target

Don’t be a coffee shop simp!

This is like being the guy who goes to the nightclub filled with hot women and gets hung up on the cocktail waitress or bartender. Don’t get distracted by the staff!

It’s fine to flirt with the barista (assuming she isn’t a neon-haired non-binary potato), but avoid making her your target. I know, she’s cute and friendly and you’ve seen her half a dozen times before. But she is also on the clock and has male patrons hitting on her all day.

Your odds are much better with the many varied other cutie-pie patrons, I assure you.

So, flirt with her, tease her a little bit, but then move on.

Even if she’s firing signs of interest at you like a machine gun be wary of going for it here.

Date the barista and guess whom you WON’T be dating? All the other girls in the café!

At least not without your barista love affair staring DAGGERS at you every time you try to chat up another pretty patron.

Take it from ol’ Chase: don’t make the barista your target.

 

Step #4: Scan for Approach Invitations Before You Sit

Lately on our forum we’ve had several debates between members about whether you should always look for approach invitations or not even bother keeping an eye out for them at all.

My opinion on approach invitations (AIs) is that you should not rely on them but you should always look for them.

This is particularly the case when you go to grab a seat in coffee shop. Because riddle me this: which scenario do you think is more likely to go your way?

1. You take a seat next to a girl who is totally absorbed in her laptop and doesn’t even bother to look at you when you pass by her and throw out an attention grab or two.

2. You take a seat next to a girl who is shooting glances at you, brushing her hair back, straightening herself up, and adjusting her clothes as she obviously tries to catch your eye.

Sure, it’s possible the laptop girl may just be so absorbed she didn’t notice you, and that once you start talking to her it will turn out she’s single and interested. But a fair amount of the time it is going to turn out that she is not single or not interested, and anyway she is just there to work.

The girl who is signaling you, meanwhile, is almost certain to be delighted you sat next to her, and very happy you started talking to her.

You are not always going to get approach invitations while scouting around for where you will sit, but if you do, use them.

Don’t forget that if there is no seat next to a girl who is signaling you, but the coffee shop is crowded, you can just ask her if you can take a seat across from her at her table. She is probably going to tell you, “Oh, sure!”

 

Step #5: If No AIs, Choose a Semi-Conspicuous, Semi-Secluded Seat

Let’s say you received no AIs from girls while scouting out, and there aren’t any non-signaling girls you want to plop down next to anyway. Where should you sit?

Your goal here is to post up in the place most likely to get an eligible girl sitting down near you sometime after you sit.

My recommendation is to choose a seat that is:

• Semi-conspicuous: a girl needs to be able to notice you and not overlook you when she enters the café after you and scans around for a seat.

• Semi-secluded: you do not want a wide open ‘unprotected’ seat smack dab in the busy middle of the café. Most girls are skittish about ‘unprotected’ seats – the only girls who will sit near you in this case are the very bold types or girls who simply have nowhere else to sit because the entire rest of the café is full. Pick a place that is partially out of view so a girl will feel safer sitting next to you.

There’s the decision of whether to sit in the middle of a seating area, so you have seats on either side of you – double the chances a girl sits near you? – but in my experience you’re actually more likely to get a girl sitting next to you if there’s already someone on your other side (best odds of a girl sitting next to you), or your other side is a wall (decent odds though not as good as with someone on your other side).

I suspect the reason for this is a guy alone with no one next to him on either side just looks too intimidating to sit next to. A guy with someone on the other side of him a girl can say to herself, “Okay, there’s already someone next to him, so it won’t look weird if I sit on his open side.”

 

Step #6: Slow Opening’s the Way to Go

If you have my book How to Make Girls Chase, crack open the bonus book Slow Opening and review the process to slow open. I devised it to let me pick up girls in coffee shops and cafés and other such places, and it’s the best possible opener to use for girls seated next to you who likely aren’t going anywhere for an hour or more.

If you don’t have HTMGC, you can fall back on general situationally relevant openers – those still work fine. If she’s tapping away on a laptop or tablet or studying with papers:

• “Running the whole office from your laptop?”

• “Typing out your doctoral dissertation?”

• “Studying for med school?”

If she’s just sipping her drink and scrolling her phone, then stuff like:

• “Checking up on how the office is doing without you?”

• “Do they know you’re reading celebrity gossip on your coffee break?”

… does the trick just fine.

One thing you absolutely do NOT want to do is open direct. Avoid compliments, statements of interest, and so on – even if she reacts very grateful, it still puts a lot of pressure on her because neither her nor you is going anywhere, and now she has to wonder if this flattering man is going to start laying it on thicker and thicker and coming on hard… because that will make things really awkward.

You want casual, relaxed, and low pressure openers for stationary girls seated next to you.

 

Step #7: Check Her Logistics

Is she meeting someone there?

Especially at socialize cafés, you will get a lot of ‘red herring girls’ who seem like perfect approach candidates, only to end up being a bait-and-switch.

These are the girls who sit down by themselves, dressed up all sexy, fixing their hair, shooting little glances at you, and you think, "Oh! That girl’s a prime pickup target!” You slide over and start to chat her up; and she’s receptive! Friendly, flirtatious… then five minutes in her date shows up and sits down right across from her.

Should’ve checked her logistics.

To avoid wasting time on these red herrings, as soon as you start talking to her – especially if she seems over-dressed and overly flirtatious – you want to find out a couple of things:

1. Is she meeting someone?
2. What’s their relation?
3. What are they meeting to do?

If it turns out she’s meeting a date, lover, officemate, or anyone else, even if it’s just her girlfriend, you want to get her contact info ASAP (e.g., within about two minutes max) just so that you’ve already grabbed it before the other person is there to see and make things more awkward.

Then when the other party arrives, you want to just be friendly, chat for 15 seconds, then let the two of them alone to their conversation.

Of course, if she isn’t meeting someone, then game on…

 

Step #8: Only Instant Date Her If She’s Very Into You

Girls you pick up on in coffee shops and cafés can be deceptively friendly and receptive, compared to what you normally get from girls in, say, other forms of day game or in night game.

This can trick you into thinking these girls are more into you than they are, or that you are further along with them than you are. A lot of the time though they just have much lower approach walls due to the higher trust environment of the café (lots of people around; most people are probably students or professionals of some sort; people are usually well-behaved).

I do not suggest you try to instant date a girl just because you talked to her for 10 minutes in a café and she seems cool. She probably expects to be at the café for some time, whether to study, work, read, or relax. Even if she likes you, she likely doesn’t want to be pulled away soon after arriving.

Therefore, I suggest you save instant dates (where you are going to propose she joins you for a walk outside or to change to a different venue) for just a few situations:

1. Girls you have talked to off and on for a few hours, who have seemed consistently interested, are compliant, and are giving you signs of interest.

2. Girls you start talking to who act EXTREMELY interested in you – like leaning way in, asking lots of questions, laughing too hard at your jokes, and touching you.

In either case, you want to check with her what she has to do and if/when she’s done. If she tells you some variation of “I’m done right now” or “I don’t have anything firm I have to do” then you can pull her somewhere else.

Otherwise, I suggest you stick to taking contact information from girls you meet in cafés and coffee shops. Take her phone number (or WhatsApp, etc.), not her social media/Instagram. I know taking her Insta is lower friction in the moment, but you want the stronger form of contact, not a weaker one.

If you both end up hanging around a few hours more, you can always talk to her intermittently, and if she seems to be hanging around past having done whatever she came there to do, you can propose the two of you take a walk or get a meal.

And that is how to pick up girls in coffee shops and cafés.

 

Remember, don’t spam approach, and don’t use direct openers.

You’re never going to be able to do large amounts of volume at cafés and coffee shops. These are not places you can mass approach. You need to use strategic, opportunistic approaching. At your most attuned, you will not likely be making more than 4 to 10 approaches per week in cafés. Usually no more than 1 to 2 approaches per café visit.

Nevertheless, coffee shops and cafés are worth learning to pick up girls in if you frequent them. You are going to see women in them, and because the environment is higher trust, those women will tend to be relatively open to meeting and more likely to give you warmer receptions. You typically are not going to deal with harsh rejections pretty much ever in coffee shops (unless I guess you are being weird).

If you like, you can visit multiple cafés in a day. If you work online or like relaxing at cafés on your day off, you can fit in three or so different coffee shops and cafés in a day. (I am also a fan of yogurt bars – they fit the same patterns as coffee shops/cafés in terms of clientele and pick up dynamics. Plus, yogurt is healthy.)

Also: if you are concerned at all about reputation, the simple solution is just be friendly with everyone. Talk and joke with baristas (even the non-binary potato ones), chat up some random fellas around you, and so on. For every one girl you talk to, talk to a guy. People will just view you as a friendly guy, instead of a creeper.

So that is picking up girls in cafés and coffee shops.

Don’t make it your mainstay.

But as another place to approach and pick up girls, the coffee shop or the café can serve up scrumptious hunnies just as well as it serves up caffeinated beverages.

All you need is a wee bit of strategy and a smidgen of game.

Chase