Category Archives: Bars

Coffee Spots which have bars serving a wide range of alcohol, rather than those focusing on wine (see Coffee & Wine) or beer (see Coffee & Beer)

Toi Moi & Café

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Toi, Moi & Cafe | Cafe TorrefacteurToi Moi & Café (“You, me and coffee” for those who don’t speak French) is a micro-roaster with its own café, located conveniently just around the corner from my friend Adam’s apartment, where I was staying in Montréal. It’s the last of the Coffee Spots from the visit I made to Montréal back in March and rounds off an excellent visit. I came to Montréal with no expectations and left having found a wonderful coffee scene, with a wide variety of places.

Toi Moi & Café doesn’t fit the bill of the third-wave coffee shop: as well as serving coffee, which it roasts itself, it’s also an excellent breakfast, lunch and dinner spot in a residential part of Montréal. And it has lots of cake. In short, it does pretty much everything, and, being around the corner from Adam’s, I found myself a fairly regular visitor, heading there for both breakfast and lunch, as well as coffee and cake!

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Résonance!

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A fine vegan cortado from Résonance, the milk being a blend of almond and coconutOne of the great things about my (now not so) recent trip to Montréal is the variety of the places that I visited. They all serve excellent coffee, but that’s about all they have in common. Take Résonance, another of the recommendations I got from Marie-Ève of Pikolo Espresso Bar. Down in a basement, it’s in what I’d call an “interesting” part of Avenue du Parc (about 12 blocks up from Pikolo). Café by day, jazz bar by night, it serves a full range of vegan food, one of the few coffee spots in Montréal not to focus exclusively on coffee.

Résonance, supplied by Toronto-based Pilot Coffee Roasters, offers as wide a variety of coffee as any place I’d been on my trip. Along with the usual espresso-based drinks, pour-over and cafetiere coffee was also on offer, plus decaf options (essential, I would have thought, for somewhere that says open until midnight!). It was also one of the more spacious coffee spots I’d visited, roughly the same size as Café Olimpico but with a very different atmosphere, which changed as the evening wore on, the focus subtly shifting from coffee to jazz.

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9Bar Coffee

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9Bar Coffee, complete with perky coffee bean...Newcastle’s 9Bar serves excellent coffee and world-class cheese toasties. In that respect, it reminds me of Montréal’s Le Lapin Pressé although that’s where the similarity both starts and ends. While Le Lapin Pressé, contrary to its name, is almost as laid back as Flat Caps Coffee, 9Bar is at the opposite end of the scale.

The walls are plastered with the four characters “9Bar” repeated over and over again, interspersed with slogans such as “The pressure is good for you | 9Bar coffee” (if you’ve not worked it out yet, espresso is made by forcing hot water through the ground beans at nine bars of pressure). This, coupled with the really loud music (loud enough for several other people to comment on how loud it was…), make for a pumped up atmosphere which I found really enjoyable (much to my own surprise). However, if that’s not to your taste, there are seats outside, plus a large outdoor seating area on the broad pavement of the pedestrianised Grey Street, right next to the Theatre Royal.

As well as coffee and toasties, 9Bar has other food options, a good selection of cake, tea, soft drinks, beer and wine by the glass.

August 2015: I had heard rumours that 9Bar had closed, but on my latest trip to Newcastle, I popped by and it has indeed gone, with no evidence that it was ever there, which is a real shame.

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Café Boscanova

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Café Boscanova is the perfect find on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I suspect it would be the perfect find whatever the weather, but I can only comment on my first-hand experience. Perhaps I should come back to test a range of weather conditions. I also suspect that it would be the perfect find regardless of the time of day, except perhaps the evening, when it is inconveniently shut…

Boscombe, on the Dorset coast, is not perhaps where I would first look for top notch coffee, but acting on a tip-off, I sought out Café Boscanova. It looked promising from the outside, but on stepping inside I was sold. Wooden floors, brick walls, stuff everywhere: it’s a very busy, lively and above all fun place. The staff might be the happiest I’ve seen in a coffee shop and their enthusiasm is infectious.  The coffee is outstanding, the food interesting (in a good way). Really, the only thing I can fault it for is being 100 miles away from my house…

March 2015: Café Boscanova is now open on Wednesdays! You can also check out what Café Boscanova calls its “specialist coffee outlet”, South Coast Roast, over in Bournemouth.

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Champagne Central

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If you’re looking for somewhere to spend that odd hour while you’re waiting for your train at Glasgow Central station, then look no further than Champagne Central (although it now has competition from the likes of Riverhill Coffee Bar). Part of the recently-renovated Grand Central Hotel, Champagne Central offers you a chance to surround yourself in opulence while you wait for your train. The coffee’s okay, but frankly, who cares when you are in such wonderful surroundings and overlooking the station concourse so you can keep an eye on the departures board? Not me, at least.

Champagne Central is more than just a posh waiting room though. It serves food, afternoon tea and has a fully-stocked bar, so any time you are looking for a touch of elegance, give Champagne Central a try. And don’t worry, you don’t have to sit overlooking the station concourse if you don’t want to!

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Bar des Arts

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A quiet, relaxed coffee spot by day and a lively, often packed bar at night, I’ve been going to the Bar des Arts since it first opened a couple of years ago. It’s my favourite coffee spot in my home town of Guildford and the one place I’ll make a point of going to just for the sheer pleasure of it. The coffee is very good (and has recently got a lot better), the pastries are excellent and the lunches never fail to delight.

As the name suggests, Bar des Arts has more in common with a European café than your standard coffee shop, which is probably what attracted me to it in the first place. A name such as “Bar des Arts” can be a double-edged sword: it sets a certain level of expectation which, if not met, can be very disappointing, but Bar des Arts has never failed to exceed my expectations, which is why I keep coming back.

The website describes itself as “an oasis of calm” which it most certainly is. A couple of minutes’ walk off the beaten track, Bar des Arts is certainly worth the (very small) extra effort.

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