The FIFA Fan Festival has officially kicked off in Houston as the 2026 World Cup gets underway, but it looks as if a nearby business has already been red-carded at the start. Popular Houston café Koffeteria on Thursday shared an alarming social media video that showed its business being completely choked off by all the festivities.
Koffeteria’s troubles started roughly a month ago. The bakery and coffee shop at 1110 Hutchins St. in East Downtown was “boxed” in by two very large construction projects: the controversial I-45 expansion project and the FIFA Fan Festival development ahead of the 2026 World Cup. Employees and regular customers soon found that venturing to the critically acclaimed café had become frustrating.
“While many of these plans have been communicated, the projects are overlapping, and create routes that are lengthy and require going through active construction zones,” Andreas Hager, Koffeteria’s operations manager, told Chron in May. “Parking, which has always been a problem, has also been greatly reduced. There are also often city projects happening as well, which are not typically communicated to us, in addition to private construction projects.”
Latest developments
Thursday, it appeared those issues have now escalated. In a post accompanying a social media video, the Koffeteria team said they’ve now effectively been shut off from the rest of the city and the potentially lucrative traffic from visitors to FIFA Fan Fest, which opened to the public the same day just down the street. Barricades were seen at Lamar and Hutchins streets, just a few yards away from the café.
The sight of a dead street feels a wee ironic considering Koffeteria also happens to be an official partner for the festival…