Over-priced, and in spite of there being no queue apparently an over-worked counter staff who tutted and sighed at such modest requests as asking for Oatey milk, and, God forbid, a receipt! The tea had no flavour a d the scone I think was supposed to have made acquaintance with some sort of cheese and a herb I cant quite remember and certainly did not taste. The person clearing tables clearly did not appreciate a helping hand. A thoroughly dispiriting experience the Saturday before Christmas. I decided not to stay in the bookshop. read more

I went for the homemade Jaffa Cake and free wifi. I didn't manage to get either. Despite this, the Cafe 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 cafe's other failures for this. read more

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Avoid the cafe at all costs- dirty floors and tables, and the store owner is extremely rude and speaks to customers in a condescending way.

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-Cafe 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! read more

I can't understand why coffee chains are so poplar when there are places like Rays Jazz Cafe. 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. read more

The Cafe @ Foyles - Coffee & Tea Near Me - London, XGL

Eating at cafe. It is perfectly socially distant. People are wearing masks Throughout store. There are not many places I feel comfortable visiting. Thanks for making this place safe. read more

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. read more

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 cafe, surrounded by dirty cups. Humpf! read more

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. read more

The Cafe @ Foyles - Stacking the shelves, feet on the prep surfaces. Nice! - Coffee & Tea Near Me - London, XGL

I love bookstores, I love a good coffee brew and I love Jazz. That is why this place gets five stars for ingeniously combing all three in the busy streets next to Tottenham Court station. An afternoon browse in the bookstore is made complete by a coffee at Ray's Jazz cafe. The coffee and sandwiches are brilliant, and the atmosphere makes you want to linger. I feel like I'm home anyway, and often do. They occasionally have some great live Jazz performances, which are fantastic. I can think of no better way to spend a Saturday afternoon than at Foyles. I sometimes browse through a couple of books before buying one that takes my interest, and the jazz cafe is the perfect environment to contemplate ideas. Or just people watch. read more

the cafe is located on the 5th floor of foyles book store. they offer a range section of cakes, hot drinks & fresh prepared food for lunch. great for a little break & a refreshed book-hunt (: great lemon drizzle cake!! make sure to give it try! read more

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A tiny cafe on the second floor of Foyles, its dedication to Jazz is famous. With a fabulous collection which is always going through a makeover, the genres are from Modern, Avant Garde, Blues & Roots which is my all time favourite and the others. Part of the busy bookstore the Cafe have a selection of quick meals, and is a tea house in itself. Its a confused mix of self-service and table service, conditioned to the number of people that visit them. A perfect place to sip a cuppa and listen to some good old apple blues. read more

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 cafe 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. read more

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. read more

I came here for peppermint tea on one of my incredibly boring dieting weekends, where sugar, caffeine and alcohol are all ruled out in favour of herbal teas and only eating when genuinely hungry. The peppermint tea is excellent, and the cafe is very relaxing with uptempo jazz playing in the background, which allowed me to forget my sugar cravings and general tedium of denied pleasures! I don't know why they didn't make the cafe bigger though, the only thing I thought was wrong with the old Foyles was that the cafe was too small (oh and the lift was often scarey) but they've moved to a whole new building and kept the cafe the same size. It basically just means you end up standing around waiting for a table to free up when it's busy. Worth mentioning the lift is fun though! Stopping as it does on each half floor. At least they got that right :) read more

Like Foyles itself Rays Jazz Cafe seems to have quite a deserved following. The Cafe is on the first floor of Foyles, though it also has its own stair case. The Cafe is spread across one room with wooden flooring, a few wooden tables, and counter seating where you can look out at the street below. The coffee is good as is the food. They sell a range of good quality cakes, soups and sandwiches. The counter service staff are friendly and fast. Though often busy the cafe has a relaxed atmosphere and it is a good place to get off the busy Central London streets and read for a while or have some coffee and cake with friends. read more

The Foyles Cafe 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 cafe 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. read more

I've been coming to the foyles cafe for the past year almost every weekend and so far staff has always been friendly and the atmosphere was great. But yesterday I had a really bad experience :/ Makes me sad, as always really liked it at this cafe. There was a guy, I think he was some sort of manager, he was very rude and unfriendly. I really wonder why such unfriendly rude people work in customer service, just doesn't make sense to me. read more

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. read more

This used to be a favorite place of mine, then the Jazz CD shop moved out of the cafe, the volume went up, the service became hit and miss. I used to feel that you could rely on Ray's Jazz Cafe, 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. read more

Surprisingly nice place to stop for a relaxing cuppa.

The Cafe @ 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. read more

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 yelp/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. read more

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 cafe 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 ;) read more

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 cafe 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. read more

This place wins a great deal on atmosphere. Besides the fact that it is located inside Foyles, it has a good feeling, with some soft jazz playing, a good mixture of people. The coffee is better than average, but not quite living up to my idea of top quality coffee. It also has free wifi, but at the time I was there, it wasn't properly working. read more

Rays has been recently refurbished and a lot bigger than it used to be as they moved the jazz shop upstairs. There is jazz playing in the background, and you can enjoy good coffee, tea, juices and a selection of sandwiches, quiches and cakes. It's a great place to drop off and get out of the rather horrible Charing Cross road and busy West End hustle. read more

This would have been a five star review, but they recently changed the set-up of the cafe, and I liked it better before. Now the space seems a bit too empty, where as before the tables were more packed and the cafe, in turn, had a more intimate feel. However, despite this, it still retains a lot of charm: floral tablecloths adorn the mismatched sturdy wooden furniture and the cafe attracts a mixed but mostly bookish crowd. This is of course due to its location in the wonderful Foyles bookshop - one of my favourite in London for its wide collection and independence. I love the air of a bookshop - the stillness, the smell, and of course the endless books of endless possibilities - but the Foyles cafe is also a favourite for its food, and more specifically its cakes. It was here i discovered the Jaffa Cake - no not the biscuit, but a cake version of it - amazing. There is a variable selection of cakes including vegan and gluten-free options, so everyone can be satisfied. The warm food is also lush, and includes a selection of wraps and salads with interesting and healthy ingredients. The Cafe at Foyles is wonderful in its own right and is only magnified by its location in the bookstore. read more

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. read more

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 cafe with music and a stage was much nicer than this sterile offering read more

Rays Jazz Cafe, located on the first floor of Foyles' flagship store on Charing Cross Road, is without doubt my favourite place to get a coffee in London. Entering through the almost unnoticeable doorway to the side of the main bookstore entrance, you head up the narrow flight of stairs only to be greeted with the loud, bustling hubbub that is Rays Jazz Cafe. Always full of life and atmosphere, the sound of espresso machines and the tinkling of china competes with the soft sound of jazz being played from the speakers and the general buzz of conversation coming from the melee of customers. It's true, it is always busy and you can often be hovering around desperately trying to find a seat at the edge of a table with a group of strangers, but persevere and its definitely worth it. The decor is the perfect antidote to the monotony of big chain coffee shops, with an eclectic mix of antique, dark wood furniture and beat up sofas, and an ever changing display of prints adorning the walls, its kind of like school room meets downtown New York chic. The coffee is great and also cheap - £1.80 for an americano, plus they do a student discount - and the food, although a little more pricey, is freshly made and always tempting - salads, quiches, olive rolls and falafel are just some of the things on offer. They also serve wine and beer and regularly have live performances from local and international jazz and folk acts, a great attraction and the perfect way to spend the evening. I tend to spend hours reading with a nice hot coffee when I need a break from college, which conveniently for me is next door! read more

Cute little place to rest your legs with some very nice presentation of pastries and salads. Would have been 5 stars but there is a hygiene problem. Big ass flies on the pastries and cake, and staff pretend that they don't see it. When your customers are swatting the flies off for you... it is a real turn off. Just ordered drinks and decided not to order the food. read more

I've never had a good experience here, but today's was bad enough to say something. It's difficult to find a seat, the food and drinks are overpriced, and the people working there are rude. Also, today was served something other than what I ordered and got an extreme amount of attitude when I tried to get what I had paid (too much!) for. Won't be making the mistake of trying to stop here again. read more