After befriending a woman through social media, Ziyad Abdulrahman, 26, a teaching assistant at an Islamic university in the holy city of Medina, met her in person not long ago at a Riyadh restaurant. It was his first time being alone with a woman in public.

“It was totally fine,” he said. “Actually, I was a little late to this. People have changed.”

For a while, fancy burger joints were everywhere. Food trucks had a long moment. Social media whetted one frenzy after another.

“It’s because we have nothing to do,” said Abdulrahman, an Uber driver in Riyadh, who gave only his first name. “Just these coffee shops.”

What is becoming acceptable in Riyadh is still dicey in smaller Saudi cities. But the changes are en route.

The clientele in such coffee shops skews young, reflecting a country where more than two-thirds of the population is under 30 and an unknown proportion is chronically bored. Bars are barred, concerts and movies are just starting to become widely available. Evenings out, therefore, still tend to revolve around food and (nonalcoholic) drink, the more Instagrammable, the better.

Some women whose families might previously have allowed them to work only in the privacy of offices, if at all, now hold barista jobs. Saudis can now mingle with the opposite sex not only at home but also at movie theatres, concerts and even wrestling matches. Young entrepreneurs are opening places where Saudis can meet like-minded people of both sexes, whether they are artists, filmmakers or entrepreneurs.

I think the reason coffee shops became a trend is because people are more open to change,” said Shaden Alkhalifah, 30, who was studying at Draft Café in Riyadh on a recent evening.

“It has something to do with the current political dialogue,” she added. (And, perhaps, with the many Saudis who have studied abroad in cities with single-origin coffee bean fetishes.)

Notwithstanding Alhamood’s Google pan of Nabt Fenjan, even traditionalists have begun to unbend amid the general loosening-up, in larger cities if not yet in smaller ones or rural areas.