Seeing increased popularity in the Middle East, Caribou is preparing to expand their brand with even more stores; plus where you can find coffee that really has legs.

The Kuwait Times announced the opening of five new Caribou Coffee stores in the country this week, responding to a growing demand among Middle Eastern customers for high-end coffee and embracing the brand’s increased popularity in the country.

Gulf Coffee Company, a subsidiary of Al Sayer Group and the franchisee behind the new stores, says it plans to open more branches in the Middle East in the coming years. Caribou currently has 27 branches in the United Arab Emirates, two in Jordon and Qatar, seven in Bahrain, and 28 in Kuwait.

Last month, GulfNews.com reported on the increasing popularity of coffeehouses in the Middle East, mainly looking at the recent influx of American and European coffee brands in Dubai’s busy, tourist-driven malls. In a region where international brands like Starbucks and Costa Coffee have often dominated the market, a smaller chain like Caribou is seeing surprising success.

“We have grown quite rapidly and in this region we are in a position to compete with the two giants – Starbucks and Costa,” Abhijit Bose, General Manager of Caribou Coffee in the UAE, told Gulf News. “In Kuwait, we are definitely leading the market.”

No Reservations over these sexy espressos

Did anyone catch the season premier of “No Reservations” on the Travel Channel last Monday? Anthony Bourdain, the show’s lovably snarky chef/writer of a host, visited a café con piernas during the week’s hour-long episode about Chile.

Café con piernas literally means “café with legs”. Long before there were topless coffee shops, Chilean men began lining up in droves to have their coffee served by beautiful, leggy women in short skits. What was once just a gimmick to get men to drink more coffee, has now become somewhat of a tradition in Santiago.

The history of how these places got started is a bit fuzzy, but back in the 1960’s, instant coffees like those made by Nescafe were more popular than should be expected on a continent that produces millions of pounds of coffee each year. One entrepreneur decided to change that by opening a European-style coffee house. When the idea failed to be a success, he began dressing his waitresses in miniskirts and his competitors rushed to copy the idea.

Today, café con piernas line the streets of Santiago in varying degrees undress depending on how…uh, “hot” you like your coffee. As Bourdain said, their only competition now is from Starbucks. If you want to read more about this phenomenon, check out this amusing article by San Francisco writer John Flinn.

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