Your Guide for Craft Coffee
Perhaps no city has been affected by overtourism more than Barcelona. Between the tour groups of clueless Americans, gap year backpackers, and poorly-chaperoned packs of students, it’s impossible to escape the hoards of tourists in Barcelona. I, of course, am part of the problem. When I visited Barcelona, I was one more foreigner with a camera gawking at the Gaudi architecture. That is, until I stepped inside of Dalston Coffee….
Kentuckiana roaster/retailer Quills Coffee first opened in 2007 under the name “Quills Coffee and Books.” The original Kentucky St. location in Louisville’s Paristown neighborhood– long since closed — featured an entire wall of new and used books. It’s where I bought my first Dave Eggers novel, years before I would work at Quills, first as a barista and later as the company trainer.
Perhaps it’s fitting that Quills’s seventh café also has books. Actually, it has over 100,000 of them, only they’re not for sale….
We live in the age of the food hall. All around the globe, property developers are converting old industrial spaces into massive temples of gastronomy. Pick a city, any city, and you’ll likely find a refurbished factory or warehouse, complete with a cheesemonger, French patisserie, and at least one “elevated street food concept.”
Miami residents need look no further than The Citadel, which claims to be the largest such food hall in South Florida. In addition to the usual food hall suspects, it’s home to the second location for local coffee company Vice City Bean. …
Most visitors to Cyprus come for the Mediterranean island’s sunny weather and immaculate beaches. Nicosia, the country’s landlocked capital, rarely even gets so much as a stopover. With the international airport in Larnaca, most tourists have no incentive to make the trek to Cyprus’s largest city. But those who travel inland will find a bustling coffee scene well worth skipping a beach day. These were four of our favorite place to have coffee in Nicosia. …
“Soy hot chocolate?”
I’ve only been to Puzzle Café a handful of times, but owner Thomas Audebert has already learned my order well enough to joke with me.
Not missing a beat, I reply “Of course.”
And sure enough, a delicious double espresso turns up at my table, just like it had the several days previous….
“Good coffees is worth the stairs.” That’s the motto that’s helped make Montag Coffee Roasters a fixture of the coffee scene in Istanbul’s Kadıköy district. The original location occupies some prime real estate overlooking the fish market, and despite being a floor removed from street level, is almost always crowded. As such a pillar of the city’s Asian side, perhaps it was inevitable that Montag would expand to the more densely populated European side. But rather than opening up in specialty coffee hot spots, like Nişantaşı or Cihangir, Montag chose the up-and-coming Bomonti neighborhood….
Vienna has a long history with coffee. Legend has it the first coffee house in Vienna was opened with coffee the Ottoman army left behind at the Battle of Vienna. Whether or not that’s true, the city is still famous for its grandiose coffee houses, many of which remain relatively unchanged since the 19th century….
If it weren’t for the hoards of tourists, Innsbruck might be the perfect Alpine city. But places that are popular are popular for a reason. And Innsbruck’s stunning natural beauty, quaint architecture, and top-tier winter sports make it a travel destination like few others, even if you probably will find that tour group of American college students to be unreasonably loud.
But Innsbruck is more than just the home of the 1976 Winter Olympics. It’s also a pretty good place to get a cup of coffee. Honestly, any cup of coffee tastes pretty good when you’re staring at the Alps, but two places we had coffee in Innsbruck were a step above….
Walking down Josefstrasse, it’s easy to see why Zurich repeatedly tops lists of the world’s most livable cities. The brightly colored apartment blocs– an eclectic array of modern and neoclassical architectural styles– are flanked by wide sidewalks with plenty of trees and park benches. Impeccably-dressed cyclists constitute the majority of traffic, and the occasional motorist doesn’t hesitate to yield the right of way to pedestrians.
But what’s a neighborhood without a coffee shop? And Josefstrasse just happens to have one of the best in the world: MAME….
Istanbul is truly enormous. It’s so big, it’s hard to measure, though some counts list it as the fourth largest city in the world. As the city sprawled out over the the twentieth century, it engulfed several ancient communities, including the modern district of Kadıköy, known as Chalcedon in ancient times. Today, Kadıköy is the main cultural hub for Istanbul’s Asian half, and is home to a dense array of cafés and coffee roasters, including the new headquarters for Story Coffee….
