Your Guide for Craft Coffee
It had been four years since our last visit to the UK, so when we attended the London Coffee Festival earlier this spring we were eager to hear from local baristas about their current favorite roasters. One company kept coming up: Curve Coffee Roasters in Margate.
After being blown away by their coffee at the festival, my partners at Etkin and I decided to make the two-hour train journey to Margate, located on the north coast of Kent….
So many great cafés, so little time. We realized pretty quickly we weren’t going to be able to visit every café on our list during a recent visit to Budapest. The Hungarian capital’s coffee scene has both depth and width. We were never more than a few blocks from a specialty coffee shop, serving an array of both local and internationally known roasters.
Espresso Embassy
Espresso Embassy might be the most famous specialty coffee shop in Hungary, and for good reason. This award-winning team serves coffee from local roaster Casino Mocca and the occasional guest roaster. Even though the café was quite busy, the hospitality we experienced here was first-rate, and the coffees were dialed-in and tasting great. If you only have time for one café in Hungary, we would make it this one. (Read a previous post about Espresso Embassy here.)
Kontakt
No sugar. No Americanos. No problem. Budapest gets the Handsome Coffee treatment at Kontakt. The compact café serves coffee from local roaster KTRL with a minimalist bar setup centered around a Modbar espresso machine. On multiple visits I tried Kontakt’s filter coffee, espresso, and cappuccino, none of which disappointed.
Bon Dia / My Little Melbourne
Bon Dia is a specialty coffee shop masquerading as a soft serve ice cream parlor. Although my kids were disappointed there’s no ice cream in the winter, I was glad to see a variety of coffees from London’s Workshop Coffee and Barcelona’s Nomad, prepared on a single-group Synesso. Bon Dia’s sister shop, My Little Melbourne, is next door and also deserves a visit.
Fekete
Fekete is the Hungarian word for “black” and visitors to this café will not only find excellent coffee but a serious food program as well. For those willing to brave the winter cold, Fekete boasts a stunning courtyard.
Tibidabo
Because I have Coeliac disease, I always seek out gluten-free restaurants and bakeries when I travel. I went to Tibidabo for the gluten-free cinnamon rolls but was pleasantly surprised to discover they had a serious coffee program as well. Highly recommended for fellow gluten-free travelers.
Portobello
Portobello serves coffee roasted by the Barn in Berlin in a refined atmosphere. perhaps the real reason to visit this café is its impressive selection of natural Hungarian wine, available by the bottle or glass.
Our video covering our favorite Budapest coffee shops is made possible by our sponsor, the Etkin Dripper.
We have a mental image of the archetypal Parisian café. There’s a handpainted sign, those checkered woven chairs, and an ornate wooden bar with little hooks for your jacket.
Back in Black has none of those things, but that doesn’t mean it’s not our first choice for coffee in Paris’s 11th Arrondissement. The sleek, modern, café from KB Coffee Roasters offers …
Nestled in the Smoky Mountains, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway, you’d be hard-pressed to find a more idyllic mountain town than Waynesville, NC. But what’s a quaint, mountain town without a community gathering place? It turns out Waynesville is not only blessed with incredible natural beauty but an exceptional café: Orchard Coffee, serving locally-roasted coffee from its sister company Steamline Coffee. Behind both companies is a man who needs no introduction to long-time readers of thecoffeecompasss.com, Cabell Tice. …
Coffee is a fruit. Or, to be a little more precise, coffee is the seed of a fruit. Like any other fruit, the cultivar, or variety, of a given coffee has a tremendous impact on its flavor profile. I’m not sure if coffee cultivars were the inspiration behind Cultivator Coffee & Other Plants but it certainly seems an appropriate name for the New Albany, Indiana café….
More than a year after opening Litugry Beverage Company, Tim and TiLissa Jones can finally welcome dine-in guests to their café. It was a long time coming. It’s been over two years since we published this interview, when Liturgy was a pop up kiosk in a YMCA waiting for their space at the Durham Food Hall to be ready. Construction delays bled into a statewide lockdown, forcing Liturgy to navigate a pandemic in addition to new business struggles.
But they soldiered through and when I visited their café earlier this month, things were humming.
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In recent years the country of Georgia has seen a rather unexpected tourism boom. Travelers came not only for its unspoiled natural beauty, but its fascinating cuisine and 6,000-year-old wine culture. And while it’s still qvevri-fermented natural wines that make Tbilisi a world-class beverage destination, if you find yourself in the Georgian capital, there’s good coffee to be had as well….
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. …
