Both — the arithmetic does not leave you a choice
Both. Kuwait's population is roughly two thirds to three quarters non-Kuwaiti, and in the residential belts where most cafes actually sit — Salmiya, Hawally, Farwaniya, Mahboula — the expat share is higher still. A shop that aims only at Kuwaitis is fishing in a quarter of the pond, and usually the quarter every other brand is crowding. The right answer for almost every coffee shop is both, with different messages, not different loyalties. What changes between the two groups is not whether they drink coffee. It is when they come, what they pay, and which language they read the ad in.
The behaviour split is far more useful to you than the passport split. Kuwaiti customers skew later — a real second peak from 8pm to midnight, heaviest on Friday after prayer, and mostly sit-in orders with friends. Working expats skew to the 7 to 9am grab-and-go window, the 1pm break, and delivery to the office. Same shop, two revenue streams, two creative angles. If everything you shoot is glossy evening content, you are invisible to the morning trade that could be covering your rent from Sunday to Thursday.
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Target language and area, not nationality
Meta, Snapchat, TikTok and Google do not give you a 'Kuwaitis only' checkbox, and that is deliberate. Targeting by ethnicity, national origin or religion is restricted or outright prohibited across the major platforms, and the old proxy options were removed years ago. So stop hunting for the switch. The three levers you genuinely have are language, location and behaviour. Set the ad set language to Arabic on one version and English on the other, write each one natively rather than running the same line through a translator, and let each find its own people. That split alone usually moves cost per result more than any interest stack you can build.
Geography does the rest of the work, honestly and within policy. A 3km radius around a shop in Mahboula or Fahaheel reaches a completely different daily crowd from the same radius around Bayan, Rumaithiya or Adailiya, and you never have to name anyone's nationality to know that. Build one campaign per branch, draw the radius on real drive time — 2 to 4km in Kuwait, not 10 — and read results per area instead of guessing. Two weeks at 8 to 15 KD a day per area will teach you more about your catchment than any demographic assumption you walked in with.
Then let the numbers correct you. Duplicate the same offer into an Arabic set and an English set, hold budget equal for ten days, and compare cost per order and cost per direction request. Most cafes find the split is not 50/50, but it is rarely 90/10 either — 60/40 in one direction is the common landing spot, and the losing side is still profitable. Cut on cost per result, never on assumption. And read your comments: if half of them arrive in English while your menu board and captions are Arabic only, you have found a fixable leak, not an audience problem.
Serve both without splitting your brand in two
You do not need two brands. You need a bilingual surface. Menu in Arabic and English on the same board and the same PDF, staff briefed on both greetings, captions written in both — Arabic on one line, English on the next, not one language buried in the comments. Your signage and your Google Business Profile matter here too: a shop listed only in Arabic loses the person typing 'coffee near me' in English, and the reverse is just as true. This costs you almost nothing, and it is the cheapest expansion of your catchment available to you this month.
Price sensitivity tracks income far more than passport, so build the menu with a floor and a ceiling: a 0.750 to 1.250 KD everyday drink anyone can afford daily, and a 2.500 to 3.500 KD specialty that carries your margin. If you sell beans, subscriptions or gift boxes, put them on a bilingual store you actually own with KNET at checkout instead of handing a delivery app 25 to 30 percent of every order. A store you own runs Arabic and English side by side, and it keeps the customer's number on your list rather than theirs.
Finally, the calendar is not the same for everyone, and that is an opportunity rather than a problem. Ramadan flips your peak to after iftar and before suhoor for one crowd while the morning commuter trade thins out. Hala February fills Kuwait City and the malls. July and August empty large parts of Salmiya and Jabriya as families travel, while single-resident and shift-work areas barely move. Plan the year in blocks: evening and family offers through Ramadan and Eid, the morning and delivery offer through summer, and cut spend in the weeks your own footfall says nobody is here.