Where to Find Excellent Specialty Coffee in London

Paradox

Paradox was among my top three favorite coffee spots on my first visit to London, so it was a top priority to revisit on this latest trip.

Also worth noting that Broadway Market might be my single favorite thing to do in London, and Paradox is a block away from that stretch. 

The design of this “shop” is also unique – it’s a tiny space inside what looks like a transparent shipping container, and I’m impressed at the ability of the baristas to work together and not be constantly up in each other’s business. 

It’s in a cool little food cart pod (that’s the American term) at the eastern end of London Fields, and it’s a gorgeous little setup that they’ve got going on, full of all sorts of plants. 

They’re another coffee curator, which means they’re bringing in coffees from all over the UK and Europe.

Over multiple visits, I’ve seen Dak from Amsterdam, Cairngorm from Edinburgh, and a smattering of other roasters including Square Mile and Manhattan. 

They have a couple of different offerings to choose from.

Let’s start with the espresso, for which they have a house espresso (from Kiss the Hippo, at the time of writing) and a guest espresso, that rotates nearly constantly. 

On the filter side, they have a couple of batch brew options (usually one more funky, one more traditional – they had a washed Kenya and a watermelon co-ferment from Dak on my last trip) and a few hand brew options that are only available when they have the time (which I appreciate – it’s tough to do a hand brew in a rush). 

On my first visit here a few years ago, I had one of my favorite cups of coffee from that particular trip. 

Ever the curious coffee drinker, I asked about the three filter coffee options, probing into what roasters they were from and what stood out to them, and the barista (who I believe is also one of the owners) started waxing poetic about the hand brew option from Ecuador (roasted by Sweven Coffee from Bristol), which has a spearmint tasting note (and, she assured me, legit tasted like spearmint). 

Sometimes I roll my eyes a little bit when it comes to crazy tasting notes – a lot of the time, they feel like a gimmick to sell bags of coffee (watermelon jolly rancher, for example). 

Y’all, this coffee had an herbaceousness that was super unique, and I definitely can see where the spearmint came from.

Which speaks to their knowledge of the particular coffees they select, AND their skill in brewing them to bring out those more delicate, elusive (at least for the amateur home brewer like me) flavors. 

Over the course of our last few days in London, we decided we had to go back up to Broadway Market for the food, and Paradox made the list of stops we made.

Always up for a recommendation, I asked the baristas what the most unique and out there coffee they had for sale at the time was.

I had my eye on a coffee from Manhattan, but the speed with which the barista pointed to a natural Colombian coffee roasted by Cairngorm made me change my mind immediately and buy that to bring home. 

Naturally, when my brother and I revisited Broadway Market on this latest trip to London, I made it a priority to stop by Paradox to see if they were still around and crushing it. 

Spoiler alert: they are!

I saw a coffee that I’ve personally had multiple times from different roasters – a white honey gesha from Sebastian Ramirez – and after asking the barista (the same one I remember from a few years back) if she had a particular favorite, I landed on that coffee. 

It was like drinking a slightly floral orange juice. Super sweet, light acidity, orange fruits (peach or apricot?), pink florals.

It was everything I was hoping for based on my experience with that coffee, and more because they clearly have more skill as baristas to make the most of it. 

After three visits, I can safely put this place near the top of my list for their selection of rotating options across multiple brew methods and their near flawless execution every time I’ve been here. 

I also appreciate that the barista took the time to answer my question about London’s extremely hard tap water, and give me suggestions for how to actually make good coffee with my Aeropress in London (spoiler: don’t use tap water). 

Special Guests

Special Guests is a new entrant to the cafe scene in London, though they’ve been roasting coffee for a bit now.

After I had already been to Special Guests, Joachim from Substance in Paris (one of my favorite roasters and shops in the world) actually recommended it as a new opening in London when I was at his shop.

Which is about the best endorsement I can think of. 

Their whole thing is high end coffees, and they source some of the “best” green coffees in the world.

I use the word “best” to mean highest scoring, rarest, and most expensive (though best is always subjective – some of my favorite coffees in the past year or two were not particularly fancy). 

They have been around as a roaster since 2022, but they only recently opened a physical location in Marylebone (pronounced “Marl-uh-bone” according to the friendly, patient barista that we asked) in 2024. 

The fun part about Special Guests is the fact that they have 10+ coffees to choose from – all prepared as filter coffee – on the longest coffee menu I think I’ve ever seen. 

They’re all relatively expensive (they are all relatively fancy coffees), coming in at £6-30 a cup, though they do have your usual espresso-based drinks that are significantly more affordable (and still well-executed). 

On that menu, you’ll find coffees ranging from 120 hour anaerobic natural coffees to delicate, clean washed coffees, which makes it a fun place to try different styles of coffee. 

The baristas are also more than happy to give you some suggestions, which is how we ended up with a gesha from Finca el Ocaso in Colombia (along with Pepe Jijón’s Wave Sidra, which is one of my favorite coffees ever). 

The latter, in particular, lived up to my expectations – it’s one big giant fruit bomb, and is one of the sweetest coffees I’ve ever had. 

All that being said, the execution of one of our coffees was significantly underwhelming, which is always a tricky situation that I’m still not sure how to navigate (I avoid conflict to a fault, especially where I’m not necessarily the expert in the situation). 

Obviously, keeping 10-12 coffees perfectly dialed in is a tricky proposition, and I didn’t get a chance to revisit them, so it might have just been a fluke.

Nagare

This cafe is in a historic building across the street from Spitalfields Market, and had been on my list from the beginning as a place to stop by.

There’s a strong Japanese influence here that is fairly evident from the moment you step into the shop, and the word “Nagare” means “flowing like a river” in Japanese. 

Now, peeking behind the curtain of how these guides get made, I usually try to visit each place at least twice.

Sometimes, on the first pass if it’s too late for coffee or I’m already too caffeinated (or it’s busy), I’ll just poke my head in, see what they have to offer, and return later. 

On this particular day, it was around 2pm and we were headed to Spitalfields to buy some things that we had scoped out earlier in the trip.

I wanted to stop into Nagare to check it out, but it was both too late and too busy to really sit down and enjoy the breadth of what they had to offer.

However, I saw that they did have an Ethiopian coffee roasted by Luna on batch brew, which is one of my favorite North American roasters (they’re up near Vancouver, B.C. in Canada), and I decided to go for it. 

Now, another step back here: my perspective on batch brew has shifted over the past few years (and notably with this trip, when we had a couple of outstanding batch brews). 

In the past, I have thought that it had both a low floor and a low ceiling, mostly because the batch brew you find at most places in the US just sits there for hours in the carafe and ends up tasting horrible by the time you order it. 

Today, with the evolution of batch brewers and coffee shops paying more attention to how they prepare and serve it, I actually think that batch brew – if done correctly – has a higher floor and lower ceiling than pour over at a busy cafe.

Basically, it’s more consistent, especially in a busy environment. 

I am not joking when I say that the batch brew with that Ethiopian coffee – which was tropical, sweet, and juicy – was one of the best coffees we had on the trip. 

And I would say that I enjoyed it about as much as the fancy Panamanian gesha that we got when we came back a few days later at opening (which was also excellent, by the way). 

They have a variety of roasters that they rotate through, including a few roasters (Nylon from Singapore and Mazelab from Prague) that I had never heard of before. 

When we came back a few days after that mind blowing tropical fruit juice batch brew, we showed up at opening so that we were one of the few people in the shop and could have a more in-depth conversation with the baristas and try a fun coffee or two. 

We settled on a natural process coffee from one of the most famous farms in the world – the Elida Estate in Panama. 

They brewed it with a Switch, which I found kind of interesting (it was the first and only time I had seen – or would see – a Switch on this trip). They use the Switch to do full immersion (versus pour over), and limit the agitation to create a light, delicate cup. 

This was the fanciest coffee my brother had ever experienced (so far), and he was blown away at how light and delicate it was. It was more like a fruit tea than a cup of coffee. It was sweet and silky, and bursting with florals. 

Both the batch brew and the fancy pour over deserve a spot in our top coffees of the trip. 

Update: They now have a second location over in Soho near Carnaby Street (here on Google Maps), if you’re looking for some great coffee in that part of London.

Day Trip

The morning foray to Day Trip, which is a little further north than most tourists get but is 100% worth the journey,  was pretty clearly my favorite coffee experience of my latest trip to London. 

And it was almost entirely due to the fact that my brother and I were the only ones in the shop for most of our time here, and the two baristas – Eve and Douglas (a veteran of the London coffee scene) – were the two friendliest baristas we encountered. 

It’s in a space that is a coffee shop on one side, wine bar on the other, and it’s a compact interior with only a few seats at the bar (and a few more outside on the terrace). 

The first thing we noticed was the beautiful rock countertop (which we later learned is volcanic rock from Mount Etna) and gorgeous Japanese ceramics stacked on top of the Strada espresso machine. 

The second thing we noticed is that they have a great selection of coffees from the UK and abroad, including some higher end coffees (like the Colombian gesha we ordered as a pourover). 

They have the full range of espresso drinks in addition to three different filter preparations; batch brew, aeropress, and origami. And there are a few different coffee options for each method. 

Eve, the barista who did most of the work on our first two coffees, happily chatted with us about the different coffees they had and the coffee scene in London. 

She eventually pulled in Douglas when we asked for other recommendations around London, and he rattled off too many places he likes for me to keep track of (but I did get two new spots from his suggestions!). 

Clearly Douglas knows his stuff when it comes to coffee and coffee in London, specifically. 

There were a few cool aspects of the shop that make it really stand out as a place for coffee lovers, but it really comes down to the care and thought they put into the preparation of their coffees. 

They have a reverse osmosis system that is operated by iPad and can remineralize water to different thresholds (e.g. 70ppm for one coffee, 100 ppm for another), and a little brewing cheat sheet that features all of the variables and recipes for each of the coffees that they have on offer. 

For their pour over options, they use an Origami Air and employ the Paragon, a (somewhat gimmicky) ball that you put in the freezer and then place under the stream of coffee as it brews. 

The claim is that the immediate cooling of the coffee when it hits the Paragon keeps the aromatics – the fruity, floral smells you sometimes get when you take a whiff of certain coffees – intact so that you can actually taste them in the final cup. 

They’re only the second place I’ve ever seen that particular tool employed – the first being the excellent Ambu Coffee Lab in Madrid (which is easily my favorite place for coffee in Madrid), and it’s a cool idea (I’m not sold on whether it actually makes a noticeable difference in the final cup, though). 

Once we had finished our two cups – a coffee from Myanmar (roasted by Lucid from Belfast) made in an Aeropress that was juicy with all sorts of red fruits and a washed Colombian gesha  roasted by Atkinsons in Lancaster that was intense with orange fruits and florals. 

Douglas, seeing how into coffee we were, was kind enough to brew a fancy thermal shock Colombian coffee from A.M.O.C. (a roaster in Rotterdam) to share with us as he was dialing it in for an event in a couple of days. 

That particular coffee’s aroma was incredibly intense, and notes of passionfruit wafted across the counter to us as soon as the water hit the coffee. We were shocked at how aromatic that coffee was. 

If you’re a coffee nerd and you’re looking to nerd out about all things related to brewing – from ratios to tools to water composition, this is a great place to do it and is worth the journey!

If you’re just looking for an excellent flat white and happen to be nearby, this would also be a great option. 

Prufrock Coffee

Prufrock Coffee is one of the OG’s of specialty coffee in London – their shop in Farringdon near Leather Lane has been open since 2011. 

Their claim to fame in the specialty coffee world is that Daddy Hoff – the ever eloquent James Hoffman – is somehow involved (though it’s not necessarily clear to me exactly how) in the company, which lends a great deal of credibility with coffee nerds who almost certainly have watched one (or all) of his videos at some point in their coffee journey. 

I think Prufrock is a good place to get a good cup of coffee, but I don’t think you’re getting anything mind blowing here, like a super memorable coffee experience that you’ll remember beyond this particular trip. 

The part about Prufrock that I enjoy is the fact that they work with a variety of roasters, and have their coffees available to try in the cafe, and to purchase bags if you find one you like (along with a helpful characterization on the shelf to help you find a flavor profile you’ll like). 

Though they always have some sort of variety of Square Mile Coffee on their shelves, they also had NOMAD (from Barcelona) and Koppi (from Denmark), which are two roasters I’ve come across over and over in my European coffee adventures, and they’re both excellent. 

They rotate the roasters they have on hand, so you never know what gems you’re going to find when you stop by. When we were there last (on my most recent trip with my brother), they had three filter coffees available, and two espresso options. 

They also have Postcard Teas for the non-coffee-drinkers, which is Alysha’s favorite, and is one of the coolest tea brands we’ve ever come across (they have a shop in Mayfair). 

When we stopped by on a dreary spring morning on our trip to London a few years ago, it was relatively quiet, and we grabbed a couple of drinks to enjoy at the tables outside.

When you walk in, you’ll come up to a big U-shaped coffee bar, behind which the baristas are (frantically, when we were there) working their magic. 

I decided on a filter coffee from Rwanda that was roasted by NOMAD, which was prepared using one of those fancy pour over robots (which I’m a little jealous of).

Alysha went with a cup of tea from the aforementioned Postcard Tea. 

As we sat there, we noticed that the food seemed to be the popular thing here, with a full brunch-forward menu focused on sandwiches (of all shapes, sizes, and configurations) and pastries. I, of course, have Celiac Disease, so no pastries for me!

One thing I will say is that, though they were busy, the person that helped us was not particularly helpful when it came to knowledge about the filter coffee options they had on hand. 

Same with the teas – Alysha was trying to figure out which tea she wanted, and got almost zero help or insight. It was a little busy (but not really, it was still early), and it was an odd experience. 

When we returned a few years later, my brother and I found a very similar experience. It was busy, the baristas were working hard, and the service was fine, but nothing special. 

We had a filter coffee (a Kenyan coffee roasted by Three Marks in Barcelona) and a shot of espresso (a Tanzanian coffee also roasted by Three Marks) and both were well-executed and enjoyable cups.

Profile

This shop, which is a ~20 minute bus ride north of Day Trip (near the Emirates Stadium) was a recommendation from Douglas at Field Trip.

He spoke so highly of it that we put our other plans for the day (a trip to Broadway Market) on hold for a detour up here. 

We showed up to a tiny shop – barely enough room for the coffee bar and four tables – that was packed with people (mostly locals, it seemed) who had lucked into having this place be their neighborhood coffee spot. 

Their house roaster is La Cabra, a well-known specialty roaster based in Denmark, and they also have a rotating guest roaster that offers a bit more variety in terms of options. 

Their coffee menu is broken into three sections – espresso, batch brew, and hand brew. 

They have a couple of options for each (except batch brew, which has one), and we ended up choosing a natural Colombian coffee pulled as an espresso shot and their batch brew of the day, a juicy washed Colombian coffee that was super sweet and very pleasant to drink (I got a distinct Pink Starburst flavor, which would be an excellent flavor note on the bag that would make me buy it). 

I, Matt, have Celiac Disease, so my ability to try pastries at these places is severely limited (and I prefer to focus on the coffee anyway), but it’s worth noting that my brother had a mindblowing smoked pear danish here.  

Rosslyn

Rosslyn was started by an Australian from Melbourne (still one of my favorite coffee cities in the world) and an Irishman from Kilkenny. The name Rosslyn comes from Scottish Gaelic, where it translates roughly to “pink waterfall.” 

As soon as you step foot in their shops, you’ll see that theme carried through aspects of the design. 

The reason Rosslyn is on this list is that I really enjoyed their approach to coffee.

They strike a nice balance between being super approachable for people who aren’t really that into coffee, and being super nerdy for people who want all the details behind the cup of coffee they’re drinking. 

At the time of writing, Rosslyn has aggressively expanded to have five locations in the City of London (the part of the city that is basically the Financial District).

If you’re looking for a great flat white on the go, any of them can serve you. 

For their base coffees, rather than having a bunch of different blends and single origin offerings and being paralyzed by the choices, they have three standard coffees that are specially roasted (and the packaging is color-coded) for various purposes. 

They have one coffee – in a white bag – designed to be used in milk drinks. They have one designed for espresso (or a long black) in a black package. And they have one specifically for filter in a gray bag.

They are all single-origin coffees that rotate every so often, but you won’t find the details right there on the front of the package. They do that to simplify the process and really focus and dial in the coffees they are serving.

However, if you’re looking for a special coffee experience, I’d point you to the location a few blocks away from St. Paul’s Cathedral on Queen Victoria Street, where they have a fun freezer selection of beans from around the world. 

Of course, for coffee nerds like me, they also have a guest filter coffee available that rotates weekly or monthly (depending on how fast they go through it), and a selection of very special “off menu” coffees in a freezer at the Queen Victoria Street location. 

Those can be prepared using an Orea (and an automatic pour machine) if you’re looking for an extra special coffee. 

I, being a little bit of a nerd when it comes to coffee (and a lot of things, really), was 100% in for one of the “off-menu” coffees in the freezer.

You’ll find a very special selection of 8-12 coffees from various roasters around the world.

They’re more expensive (£6-£15 a cup), but they’re extra special, and perfect for people who want an extra special coffee experience. 

They had a nice variety of roasters, including Monogram (from Calgary) and Manhattan (from Rotterdam), along with several I’d never seen before.

When you order it, the barista will take it from the freezer, grind it, and let you smell it.

Then, when it’s served to you, it comes with a slip of paper with the tasting notes and preparation method (the ratio of water to coffee and brew time). 

The location on Queen Victoria Street was quite literally across the street from one of the places we stayed in London on a trip a few years ago, and it was pretty constantly busy on both the weekdays, when it was full of workers taking a coffee break, or on the weekend when it was mostly tourists. 

Colonna & Small’s

While coffee nerds from all over the world flock to Prufrock in London because of the involvement of Daddy Hoff (James Hoffman, one of my favorite coffee creators on Youtube), venturing a few blocks down the street brings you to a coffee shop that I think is actually slightly more enjoyable for coffee nerds, Colonna & Small’s. 

I have had Colonna & Small’s on my list for years at this point, but until relatively recently they only had a location in Bath, which is one of the day trip locations that we’ve also had on our list for years but never quite made work. 

However, in 2023, they opened a second location in London on Leather Lane, a few blocks up from Prufrock. Which means I finally got to check them off of my list of roasters to experience in the UK.

They’ve been roasting coffee in the UK for a decade at this point, and they have a few different “tiers” of coffee; foundation, discovery, rare, and “gesha.”

At their London cafe, they have a somewhat familiar style of menu.

They have the chalk menu behind the bar with three choices for espresso (which can be made into a black or white drink), three base choices for filter, and then they also have a special freezer menu with fancy coffees (usually a couple options for both espresso and filter).

Worth noting that filter coffee here is prepared with an Aeropress, which is definitely a different cup than pour over methods like V60 or Orea (which are more common in London). 

We asked the barista for a recommendation for a base coffee and they suggested the honey process Colombian coffee (from El Pedregal) as a flat white, which is an unusual recommendation, but the espresso cut through the milk in a way that I’m not sure I’ve ever experienced before. 

We also had a fancy coffee as an Aeropress – the Bolivian gesha from Los Rodriguez – and it was excellent. 

The freezer menu is definitely more expensive than their base menu, with coffees ranging from £9-20 depending on which coffee and brew method you choose, but it’s a fun way to experience some coffees that you wouldn’t ordinarily get to try outside of a couple of months a year. 

The other interesting thing to note here is that they make high end coffees in capsule form, like the kind you would use in a Nespresso machine.

I had never seen that before, and I asked the barista about them to confirm that I was actually seeing a gesha in a capsule. 

It’s an interesting idea, and I wonder what the final product is like. 

Glass Coffee

Glass was a recommendation from the baristas at Formative (who, as we mentioned above, were extremely friendly and willing to give their recommendations) when we told them that we were heading up to Camden later that day. 

To be more specific, they told us to go to the coffee shop in the back corner of the container market (or box market, as Londoners referred to it), and another patron piped up with the name (thanks, stranger!). 

The location is great if you’re heading up to Camden Market (or Camden Town) and are looking for good coffee because it is between the Tube station and the market in the container market on the right (if you’re walking north towards the market). 

It’s in the back corner of the first floor, and at first glance the space is so small that it seems impossible that they could possibly do both espresso drinks AND pour over.

The barista barely had room to turn around in a circle, but somehow they managed to make excellent cups of coffee across a variety of brew methods. 

The main reason to come here is the fact that they have a constantly rotating selection of four coffees available as pour over, usually a range of processing methods (including some funkier, more heavily processed coffees) and origins. 

They work with some of the most famous coffee producers in the world, like Nestor Lasso and Sebastian Ramirez, two of the more famous producers in Colombia in recent times. 

They roast their own coffee, which is something that has kind of exploded in London since my last visit, when it felt like every cafe was a multi-roaster.

Now, it feels almost the opposite (though London still has a bunch of great multi-roasters!). 

The board behind the barista had four coffees, all with their origin and some brief tasting notes (e.g. strawberry banana), which didn’t offer us much to go on.

I asked the barista for help choosing, and they were more than happy to oblige, asking us what kind of coffee we like (a good sign) and eventually recommending the Strawberry Banana coffee. 

They brew using an OREA with 24g of coffee to 360g of water, and are the only place I saw in London use the Negotiator, a tool created to minimize bypass with the OREA. 

The resulting cup was super sweet – definitely a little funky, but we knew that going in – and it reminded me of red berry jam. 

Scenery Coffee Roasters

Scenery is a coffee roaster in the UK that I had heard of before and seen occasionally here in the US (and online), and I was excited to learn that they were in the process of opening their own cafe in London at the time of our visit. 

I say “in the process of opening” because their space was very much a work in progress when we were there (late fall of 2024).

They were actively building out the seating area, and the result was that they were doing takeaway only. 

However, once I showed a little bit of interest in their setup (the water they use, the brewers, etc etc), the barista and one of the co-founders (Alex/Moose) went out of their way to get nerdy and talk shop with me, which I really appreciated. 

Moose (a three time semi-finalist in the UK Barista Championships) even brewed up a fun test roast of a thermal shock rosado (another name for pink bourbon, which doesn’t actually have any relation to the bourbon variety) that he quickly brewed behind the bar and shared with us. 

It was like passionfruit or papaya juice – sweet and syrupy – and I actually ended up buying a bag of it on my last morning in London to take home and share with coffee friends. 

The other coffee that I bought here was a natural SL-28 from Costa Rica. 

SL-28 is one of my favorite varieties (especially when it’s in Central or South America), and this coffee lived up to my own hype when I brewed it at home (I put some single doses in the freezer to share with friends in the future, which only gets done with special coffees). 

I’ll definitely be in London at some point in the near future, and I’m excited to see what the space turns into over the course of the next couple of years as they finish their build out. 

Even More Great Coffee Shops to Check Out

Like I mentioned above, there’s way too much good coffee in London for me to write what is essentially a love letter to every single one. 

So I focused on the places that stood out to me for one reason or another. Maybe it was the friendly service combined with the amazing coffee, or maybe it was a unique approach to serving coffee. 

The point is that there are literally hundreds of other coffee shops that can serve you a great cup of coffee in London. Here are some others that were either on my list, or that I went to and enjoyed.

Nude Espresso: I enjoyed this spot, which has a location right next to the Upmarket on Brick Lane that we stopped by on a sunny Sunday afternoon. The staff were incredibly friendly, joking about the differences between UK and Australian coffee culture, and they let me try the drip coffee (a bright and fruity Ethiopian coffee) even though I had ordered an espresso. 

Kaffeine: Usually, I try to keep the places in these guides laser-focused on the places that have their eyes set on the coffee, rather than the brunch or other types of food. Mostly, that’s because I have Celiac Disease and 99% of the time, I can’t partake in the food anyway. This place is both an excellent place for coffee – particularly because you’ll have the chance to try a guest espresso, which they constantly rotate to bring new and exciting coffees in. I got a juicy Kenyan coffee that was pulled pretty much perfectly. 

Monmouth Coffee: This is probably among the most important shops in the rise of London’s coffee scene. They have a ton of different coffees available that you can buy in smaller-than-usual quantities, which is a fun way to get a bunch of different beans to try. Their filter coffee rotates every so often – when I was there, they had a nice raisin-y coffee from El Salvador. One thing I like about them is that they’ve completely gotten rid of disposable cups. You have two options for your drink – get it for “here,” or borrow a reusable takeaway cup for £5 (which you get back when you return it). They have locations at Borough Market and in Covent Garden near Seven Dials Market. 

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