The Cafe @ Foyles

Aw, nice little spot. All wooden, good coffees, a spot to grab a break from the chaos of the world around you.
Because the West End is serious chaos. And if you do need a spot to sit and think and sip and just take a break, this is a good place to do it.
Plus, it’s attached to a book store, so who could hate that?
They make a decent cup of coffee and have some nice snacks if you need it. But really, the quiet alone makes this place a win.

Love this place! The coffee is good and not as expensive as the «fancy» Starbucks down the road. I’ve only tried their cakes once and the one I had was quite dry but I don’t go there for the food anyway. It is always pretty busy but finding a spot to write is not that hard. The staff is really nice as well — a member of their team once asked me and my friend if the music was too loud for our liking which I thought was very considerate. The café always has a nice atmosphere to get some writing done or even read. One of my favourite places in London!

No atmosphere whatsoever, very pricey sandwiches and the only music is from one of the guys behind the counter whistling bits of random tunes which is annoying. The old café with music and a stage was much nicer than this sterile offering

Coffee was great and choc brownie too! Not too crowded and not noisy like most coffee places in the west end, it’s a great venue for studying.

I love this place. It’s out of the hubbub of the West End, it’s civilised, arty, they have good coffee and it’s a great place to sit and have a chat if you’re out and about in town. Somehow the café at Foyles is a bit of an oasis. I don’t know what else to say really, if you’d like a coffee near Tottenham. Court Road, this is one of the best places to sit and drink it.

The Foyles Café is a nice place to stop, and although it’s regularly busy, it’s mostly regulars. The coffee is good, as are the sandwiches, and the tables are comfortable and plentiful. It’s a good place to stop if you’ve got visitors and you’ve been trailing up and down Oxford Street or through Soho all day, as it’s off the street and it’s a large place.
The negatives are the high prices, the louder-​than-​necessary music, and the fact that every time I’ve been there (which is a lot), I haven’t been able to connect to the wifi, and that’s not just on the one device. It does mean I can have guilt-​free reading time, but still.
It’s a café in a bookshop — two of my favourite things — and although it doesn’t quite tick all the boxes I can often be found here, scrunched up in the corner with a book, trying to block out the music.

Surprisingly nice place to stop for a relaxing cuppa.

The Café @ Foyles is a pretty cool place to hang out for a few hours. The drinks are reasonably priced and there’s a nice busy, but not too loud feel to it. I normally think cafes in bookstores lack some necessary character, but this one does its best with rustic-​looking tables and a jazz stage.

Was there waiting for a friend to finish some business around the corner. Was going to check out the bookstore but found the side entrance to the café first. Quirky, hep place with church pew seating and wobbly tables. Crowded but was able to grab a place by the window, then eventually my own coffee cup filled table. It was nice because I was able to slip by the concession line and just grab some water and people watch/​write in my notebook. The prices were a bit steep but the food looked tasty.
Basically good place to sit and get work done with no pressure to buy something.
There’s a stage in the corner. That might be interesting next time. I think someone had just finished up by the time I got there.

This used to be a favorite place of mine, then the Jazz CD shop moved out of the café, the volume went up, the service became hit and miss. I used to feel that you could rely on Ray’s Jazz Café, now I brace myself before I step in. And sure enough: often it’s loud and not that great. I had my best and worst coffees here.

i gotta say, i love this place. i come here when i want to be anonymous and re-​energized by a good crowd atmosphere (as opposed to a bad one — COUGH /​Piccadilly Circus/​COUGH)
maybe it’s because i’m not *really* a londoner, maybe it’s because i am a total sucker for anything related to bookstores or reader culture, maybe it’s because i love jazz music, or maybe it’s because i’m into cute tousled-​hair indie guys with glasses reading above-​mentioned books.
either way, i’m totally down.
ignore the prices of the food (who eats food at bookstore cafes anyway? the sandwiches are always wet and soggy anyway, haha), get an americano, and sit on one of the thick wooden tables around 5pm when its bustling with academics, intellectuals, youngish folk, diary-​writers and educated tourists. soak in the jazz music (i hear the live jazz isn’t bad either these days) and suck in a true big-​city café atmosphere.
lounging in here, i feel like i’m in london, paris, NYC, vancouver, portland, seattle, montreal, barcelona and toronto at once. it’s a quintessentially bourgeois, intelligentsia-​style cultural experience at it’s best ;)

Bookshops make me poop. Don’t know why, it might be an association thing, but they do. So I’m quite grateful that Foyles has a café in it, which also means they have a loo.
I love Foyles, and have been going here since I was a kid. I remember my dad buying me a hot chocolate while we read through our books on our annual trip there. But The Café @ Foyles just isn’t what it use to be. Dirty tables littered with empty cups and dirty plates, no room to work, sit or read even though there is super fast free wifi, and it’s certainly not quite. A book shop should be quite, peaceful and a place where you escape the city. Maybe it’s just a victim of it’s own success.
Also, everything seems to be quite expensive, over £2 for a fizzy pop. That’s a bit pricey, and not really worth it as you’re sat in a noisy café, surrounded by dirty cups. Humpf!

i used to go here every week to write. they had good food and free wifi and it got me out of my couch, off Unilocal/​facebook/​foodblogs, and got me to actually be productive.
and then i realized how shoddy their internet is. and realized how expensize theyr food is for how much youre actually getting.
are their fresh juices amazing? omg yes.
and the little salads they put together everyday regardless of the fact youre spending £3.50 for a tiny box that makes you want like 5 of them to feel remotly full? yeah they still taste pretty good.
but at the end of the day, when i was having to redo all my work that i went there specifically to do on several occations, i just gave up and found a new soho free wifi and coffee place to be productive.
the thing is the atmosphere is great. there are these little communities of people that go all the time. being that i was briefly a regular, i saw that there were many other regulars. and it has a nice feel to it.
so yes, i still go.
for what its worth.

Had a cuppa coffee there this morning and good coffee it was. Taken by the pretty tall girl serving, flustered by the twit coming back for a receipt after the event saying don’t blame me blame the inland revenue. What a twat. Twit twat. The café is an oasis in a book store in a part of town that is and has been for a while a pile of shite. I have a photo to post of one of the café staff standing on the food preparation surface in her socks! At least she took off her shoes.

I love coming here… there’s just an amazing vibe somehow… an interesting mix of people: partly bohemian, partly artsy & partly nerdy. Already when I enter, I feel like I am in the midst of a huzzle & buzzle that makes me feel right at home.
I usually come here for studying or meeting friends; they have free wifi — which I have to admit can be very temperamental — but if it’s not working, I simply sit back and watch the crowds interacting with each other… quite a sight!
The interior is really simple, yet very comfortable; wooden tables and chairs, leather seating area and lots of counter spaces by the window… the latter ones fog up easily on the typical rainy London days, which makes it even more cosier to be inside.
Food-​wise, they have an interesting mix of seemingly home-​made sandwiches and salads — very much on the healthy side — mostly.

What else can I say… well, it’s a typical Uli-​Café and I would love to find more of them… go try it out, let me know what you think and tell me of similar places!

Everything I’ve said before about this place or that place reminding me of Portland can officially be thrown out the window. Of all the places I’ve been in London, walking into the Café at Foyles is like a direct connect right back to Burnside, staring into a window of a cozy coffee shop near Powell’s. So all in all, this place is heaven.
Rustic wooden tables, free wifi, indie music playing a bit too loud, coffee that’s above average, an entire microcosm surrounding bookshop culture, vegan treats, weird organic chocolates, steamy windows, organic juices, and plenty of grunge, hipster, beat poet, scholarly types lounging around debating the literary criticism the likes of Jean Baudrillard, making you wonder who bothers to work anymore these days.
This is Portland Oregon. This is Foyles London. This is the realization that there’s no place like home, no matter where you’re currently resting your head. You’ll find me here often.

Ray’s is a great atmosphere to relax in on an afternoon and listen to great music while sipping good coffee. The food (sandwiches and cakes) is really quite delicious, but a bit overpriced even for London standards. Despite this, it is difficult not to keep going back given the good service and relaxed atmosphere.

I went for the homemade Jaffa Cake and free wifi.
I didn’t manage to get either.
Despite this, the Café at Foyles was all right. It has a purposefully rough-​around-​the-​edges vibe with battered wooden tables and chairs scattered about in the rather large space allocated for the caf inside Foyles on its third floor. The windows overlooking Charing Cross Road offered customers opting to sit on the barstools at the counter that lined the windows an interesting view for people watching.
The music was overly loud. My iced coffee was bitter and grounds-​laden. And, I know I already mentioned, but I couldn’t get my laptop to connect to the wifi — deal breaker. When I asked about it, I was told that ‘sometimes people just can’t connect’. Great.
While I was a little upset about the lack of homemade Jaffa Cake, the vegan sandwich I got instead cheered me up a little. Overall, the food on offer could be categorised as ‘hippie’, and the tree-​hugging, animal-​loving part of me is willing to overlook the café’s other failures for this.

I can’t understand why coffee chains are so poplar when there are places like Rays Jazz Café. Upstairs at Foyles book shop, it has a bit of cult status. Very pleasant to sit at the wooden tables with a good book listening to Jazz or staring out the big windows at the craziness of Charing Cross street.
Coffee is Monmouth — need I say more. Food? Nothing outrageous, the usual cakes, daily quiches and ready made sandwiches.

Foyles has well included the music department in their book shop. Not only are the staff responsible for the music floor musicians themselves (piano players etc.) but also its complimented by Ray’s Jazz coffee on the first floor. The reason this place, which recently has been expanded, is so appropriate is because after spending hours flicking through interesting books there is nothing more satisfying starting reading it.
No surprise when you enter Ray’s coffee you find yourself in a mixed age group from students, intellectuals, entrepreneurs and pensioners all enjoying with a cup of tea the first pages of their new book.
My friend who is doing her MA at Central St. Martins is living of the sandwiches they make each day fresh — I often go there to work and read if I need to get out.