Brewing with Different Waters @ Lilla Kafferosteriet
Lilla Kafferosteriet, a cafe and roastery in Malmö, hosts occasional cuppings on Sunday afternoons. I’m terrible at keeping up with the Swedish coffee scene (I don’t speak Swedish) and would never have known about these, but luckily Oscar from Portafilth.com keeps me in tune with where the coffee geek action is happening in Malmö. Last...
Espressamente Illy – Seoul, Korea
A lot of coffee drinkers stumble upon Illy in their initial quests for better coffee. It’s hard to miss their shiny silver and red packaging in the supermarket or at the cafes serving their coffee. Established in the 1930s, Illy is family owned and known for pursuing scientific coffee research, and creating standards for brewing...
A trip to Paris, introducing Cafe Lomi & Frog Fights
The French have, some would say deservedly, a terrible reputation in the specialty coffee community. I tried to find a few good cafes to review while I was in Paris over the holidays, a little ray of hope for the French coffee scene, but unfortunately most of the time they were closed due to special...
Coffee Collective – Copenhagen
Coffee Collective is a world renowned Danish cafe and roastery, part-owned by 2006 World Barista Champion Klaus Thomsen, along with Peter Dupont, Casper Rasmussen, and Linus Törsäter. Their coffee is highly regarded and I’ve seen their bags proudly displayed like trophies behind the bar or in the back rooms of specialty cafes around the world....
Bear Pond Espresso, Tokyo
Bear Pond is one of the better known specialty coffee destinations in Tokyo, having made a good impression on a number of blogs, magazines, and newspaper articles over the past few years. Owner Katsu Tanaka lived in the US for many years and apparently worked as a trainer with well known specialty coffee purveyors Counter...
Paul Bassett, Shinjuku, Tokyo
Paul Bassett’s shop at Gosok Terminal in Seoul, Korea (article here), was one of my most frequented shops due to its consistently great espresso (though its convenient location didn’t hurt). They also have a shop in Tokyo that I had a chance to visit this past summer. It turns out that Paul Bassett’s Shinjuku cafe...
Streamer Coffee in Tokyo, Japan
Streamer Coffee is a cool cafe located in a more residential part of Shibuya, not far from the station. It’s run by Hiroshi Sawada, a latte art champion, along with Takehiro Kato. They have quite an ambitious array of branded products (t-shirts, leather cup-holders, glass jars, etc. etc.), including some co-branded with Espresso Parts (you...
Anniversaire Cafe, Tokyo
Omotesando is a neighborhood known for its cluster of high-fashion flagship stores (Chanel, Dior, Prada, you name it, it’s there), as well as its boulevard lined by Zelkova trees that provide welcome shade and refreshing greenery. It’s in this setting that we visited Anniversaire Cafe and found ourselves in the midst of a wedding ceremony,...
Cafe de l’Ambre: Old School Coffee in Tokyo, Japan
Cafe de l’Ambre is a quirky Tokyo legend, located a few zigzagging side-streets away from the main shopping area at Ginza. You may have seen it mentioned before when Australian barista champion Scott Callaghan wrote about his trip around the world here. The coffee bar and roastery has been around since the late 1940s and...
Three rules of thumb for avoiding bad coffee in Seoul, Korea
In Korea I tried a lot of cafes, and drank a lot of bad coffee on the way to finding the great cafes that I’ve written about here. Coffee is expensive (I’ve paid as much as $15 for a bad cup of coffee in Seoul), so after a while I started avoiding places with signs...
Pot Luck @ Opening Ceremony, Tokyo
Update Jan 13, 2012: A reader in the comments writes that this cafe is now closed, replaced by an Italian restaurant. Enjoy the post below for historical purposes :) Here’s the first in a series of reviews I’ll be posting from my trip to Japan last August. I was only there for five days so...
Cafe Norden in Copenhagen
Man Seeking Coffee recently posted a link to Coffee Collective’s google map of cafes using their beans, which gave me a starting point for exploring Copenhagen’s cafe scene when I visited yesterday. The first location, called Cafe Norden, basically ticked off all the boxes on the list of preconceptions I had for what a ‘European...
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