Can you draw Albania with its bar-kafe?

1 · The mapAlbania, drawn with bar-kafe

In the UK it's the pub, in Greece the taverna. In Albania it can only be the bar-kafe. There's one on every corner, from Tirana to the smallest village, and it's where people meet, talk and spend hours over one coffee.

Like for Greece, I used OpenStreetMap. I downloaded every café, bar, restaurant and fast food place in Albania, 7,472 of them, and sorted them into bar-kafe, restaurants, the traditional byrektore, zgara and qebaptore, and pizza and fast food. Tirana, the coast and Shkodër light up the most.

2 · Finding the dataEasier than Greece, but not by much

INSTAT, the Albanian statistics office, was easy to reach, and its tables download straight away. The problem is what's in them. Cafés, bars and restaurants are always counted together with hotels, as "accommodation and food services", so I couldn't find a separate count of cafés anywhere. By municipality, INSTAT only splits businesses into "goods" and "services". The last time cafés, restaurants and hotels were counted by county was the 2010 enterprise census.

3 · The numbersDown, then back up after COVID

INSTAT's business survey counts the businesses in accommodation and food services every year. In 2016 there were 20,043. The number fell every year to 16,216 in 2021, then started to recover. The business register, which counts a little differently, shows 18,426 at the end of 2025. Unlike the UK pubs, here you can see the COVID dip.

The number of people working in them went up from about 52,000 to 56,000, while the number of businesses went down. That's the same as in the UK and Greece again: fewer places, but bigger ones.

4 · On the mapWhat's on the map, against the last count

Since the last count by county is from 2010, I compared that with OpenStreetMap today. Overall, the map has about half as many places as the 2010 census counted (7,472 against 15,308, which also includes hotels). But Shkodër and Kukës have more on the map today than were counted in 2010, so someone has mapped them very carefully. Tirana has only 38%, and Durrës and Fier about a third.

5 · NamesAlbania's Red Lion is called "Bar Kafe"

The fun part again was the names. The UK has 361 Red Lions and Greece has 38 Panoramas. In Albania, 170 places are called just "Bar Kafe", with nothing else. And 1,037 have "bar" somewhere in their name, even when they mostly serve coffee.

After that come the chains: Mon Chéri, Mulliri i Vjetër (the old mill) and Sophie. Panorama is here too, with 11, so it has made it across the border. And you can see the Italian influence: 456 names have an Italian word in them, and 255 say pizza.

The traditional places are fewer on the map than I expected: 169 byrektore, zgara and qebaptore. I'm sure there are many more, they just haven't been mapped yet.

6 · Three countriesUK, Greece and Albania

The three countries don't count in the same way, so this is only a rough comparison. In the UK there's one pub or bar for every 1,827 people. In Greece there's one restaurant, bar or café business for every 140 people. In Albania there's one hotel, restaurant or café business for every 127 people. So Albania and Greece have more than ten times as many places per person as the UK has pubs.