Category Archives: Cafes

Coffee Spots which also offer food

Artisan, Putney

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An eight segment wheel with various rewards such as free coffee, cake or any item from the menu.What’s going on? For the second time in a week I’ve visited a local chain and started with the first branch! This time, instead of going to Bath, I’ve popped up to Putney and the lovely Artisan. And, unlikely rainy Bath, it’s always sunny when I go to Putney. I really should come more often.

My first visit was on a busy Saturday afternoon in March last year, when I didn’t have my camera with me. Back then it was so busy that the queue waiting to order was all the way back to the door! Tables were at a premium and several people were sitting outside in the sun.

I’ve been meaning to return ever since and finally made it back with my camera 11 months later, when I returned on a Tuesday lunchtime, only to find it was almost as popular. Tables being at a premium again, I ended up in exactly the same spot, a little table for two by the door to the toilets!

Artisan serves up Allpress’ Redchurch blend on espresso, and these days has Berlin legends, The Barn, on filter, with regularly-rotating single origins. There’s an impressive range of cake and food too.

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Society Café, Kingsmead Square

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The Society Café sign, hanging outside in Kingsmead Square. It shows a lady in silhouette, about to drink from a cup of coffee.For once I’ve done things the right way round. Regular readers will know that I have a habit of visiting cafés with multiple locations in the wrong order, starting with the most recent, before working my way back to the original. With Bath’s Society Café, I’ve managed to do the original on Kingsmead Square first, before I visited second, more recent branch, in The Corridor.

Society Café occupies a corner spot on the southern edge of Bath’s Kingsmead Square, surely the city’s café capital. Everywhere you look, there are cafés, including, on the opposite side of the square, the Boston Tea Party. Like the Tea Party, Society Café has a large outdoor seating area spilling out onto the square. It would make the perfect place to sit sipping your coffee if it weren’t for the fact that whenever I go to Bath, it pours with rain. It’s the Manchester of the South West!

Inside, Society Café sprawls (in a nice way) across multiple rooms and over two levels, with a cracking multiple-space basement. With coffee from local roaster Round Hill, and a selection of sandwiches and cake, it’s the perfect place to spend half an hour or all day!

August 2017: I’ve learnt that Society Café has switched its house roaster to Origin, although Round Hill still features regularly as a guest.

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Siempre Bicycle Café

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The Siempre Bicycle Café logo, a stylised face with a handlebar moustache, painted in black on the white brick wall at the café .Glasgow’s Siempre Bicycle Café continues the long association between cycling and coffee, occupying a multi-facetted space right next to the Kelvinhall Metro station in Glasgow’s West End.

Out front, there’s a cycle shop and sales room, where you can, if you like, sit and take your coffee, while at the back, there’s an equally large room where more typical café seating shares the space with the counter, which itself encloses an open-plan kitchen. If you keep on going, there’s also a large, sheltered garden right at the back. Unless, of course, you’re coming from the station, in which case you reach the garden first, then the café and finally the bike shop. Siempre also has a takeaway window, so you don’t even have to go inside if you don’t want to.

Serving Dear Green Coffee’s Goosedubs blend on espresso, with single origins available as filter from both Dear Green and another local roaster, Charlie Mills, Siempre has got the coffee side of things covered. There’s also an impressive array of tasty-looking cakes, plus a very comprehensive food offering. This being a cycle shop as well as a café, there’s also plenty of secure bicycle storage both inside and out.

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Moon Beer & Coffee

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A neon sign, "moon" on the bare brick chimney breast of Moon Beer & Coffee in ChesterI first came across what was then the Harvest-Moon Espresso Bar a couple of years ago, not long after it had opened in Chester and it’s been on my radar ever since. I popped by in 2013, but it was unexpectedly closed that day and I hadn’t had another chance until now.

In that time, Harvest-Moon has undergone some changes, not least a name change to Moon Beer & Coffee after getting a licence in November last year (although the signage and some of the social media hasn’t caught up yet). While the focus is still on coffee, with an old-school espresso menu based around a house-blend from Merseyside roasters Coffee 1652, plus regularly-rotating guests, Moon now offers bottled craft beer from around the world. There’s also food with an American slant. For breakfast: toast, porridge or bagels, with more bagels and sandwiches for lunch. Finally nacho or chilli bowls, plus hummus and Bavarian meat platters, are on offer.

Just around the corner from the Cathedral with the library across the street, Moon is a cosy spot. There’s not much seating, which spread across two inter-connected spaces, while the staff are friendly and engaging with both regulars and visitors alike.

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Café Lomi

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An espresso is a classic earthenware Inker cup from Café LomiI don’t know what the French for “hipster” is, but “Café Lomi” might be a fairly good stab. It’s the closest I’ve come in Paris to what I think of as a hipster café, right down to the undecorated walls, exposed air-conditioning conduits and bare bulbs hanging from the ceiling. The clientele was pretty hipster too; for example, I wasn’t the only one taking pictures of his coffee and every other person was on a laptop, Macs outnumbering Windows two-to-one. The clinching argument? It carries Caffeine Magazine. I rest my case…

Putting pointless classification to one side, Café Lomi is a café/roaster in the northern reaches of Paris. Café-roasters seem to be much more common in Paris than they are in the UK; of the limited number of third-wave Parisian cafés I’ve visited, Lomi is the third, joining La Caféothèque and Coutume when it opened in 2012. In Lomi’s case, it is a café at the front, and a roaster at the back, where the chunky Giesen turns out espresso blends and single origins both for use in Lomi and to supply other cafés and restaurants. Sadly you can’t wander into the back and see the roaster in action though…

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Finca

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The store front of Finca on Great Western Road, Dorchester, the bulbs inside glowing in the fading evening light.Finca is Dorchester’s second speciality coffee shop, coming after the outstanding Number 35 Coffee House & Kitchen. One might think it a little unfair that Dorchester has two such places, when many struggle to have even one, but this is how it is.

Finca opened last summer and joins the select breed of coffee-shop-cum-roaster. While the majority are quite big operations, with 10-15 kg roasters, with their own dedicated area of a large building (North Berwick’s Steampunk Coffee springs to mind), Finca has more in common with Glasgow’s Papercup Coffee Company. Both are small coffee shops which roast on-site and, while in the case of Papercup, the roasting is done at the back, at Finca, the roaster, a bright-red, 1 kg Genesis CBR-1200, sits proudly on the counter-top for all to see.

Finca has a stock of three green beans, two standard and one guest, and it roasts after hours, one or two evenings a week. Roaster aside, Finca is a friendly, neighbourhood coffee shop, although it boasts a decent food offering for such a small place, including cake, soup and toasted sandwiches, all prepared in the small kitchen at the back. It’s even got a dedicated toast menu!

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La Bottega Milanese, The Light

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A flat white from La Bottga Milanese in Leeds. The coffee is in a white, tulip cup with the words "La Bottga Milanese" written on the inside of the rim, with the cafe's logo on the front.One of two outlets for La Bottega Milanese in Leeds, the branch in the Light pre-dates the recently-opened branch in Bond Court. Naturally, this being the Coffee Spot, I visited them in reverse order, first calling into Bond Court before venturing to The Light (which is a shopping and retail centre built around the old headquarters building of the Leeds Permanent Building Society).

The Light itself is a wonderful structure, of soaring brick facades and glass ceilings. La Bottega Milanese occupies a corner spot on the ground floor, just by the escalators up to the cinema. You can sit “outside” on the street without having to worry about being rained on, since it’s all enclosed by a glass ceiling.

If you’ve read my piece on Bond Court, you’ll already be familiar with La Bottega Milanese’s offering. If not, La Bottega Milanese expertly blends Italian espresso tradition with modern, third-wave roasting know-how from Dark Woods (having previously used Grumpy Mule until the start of 2016). The food’s pretty decent too: in the morning, pastries and other breakfast goodies, replaced at lunch by sandwiches and salads, which in turn give way to cake in the afternoon. Finally, come evening, there are small plates, tapas and beer/wine. Truly a café for all occasions!

June 2020: I heard the sad news that La Bottega Milanese has had to close its espresso bar at The Light, although Bond Court is still going strong.

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Foxcroft & Ginger Update

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The letters "F & G" enclosed in a heart with an arrow through it, painted on the door, with Foxcroft & Ginger written underneathIt’s been almost two years since I first visited Foxcroft & Ginger on Soho’s Berwick Street, drawn by the recommendations of my friend Hayley and the descriptions of the legendary muffins. Since then I’ve been an irregular visitor, drawn back by the mis-matched crockery (which, although depleted in number, is still there) and, more importantly, the gorgeous basement, still a benchmark for Coffee Spot basements everywhere.

Although the number of Coffee Spots staying open into the evening has been steadily expanding, with the likes of Villiers joining the more-established Notes and Fernandez & Wells, Foxcroft & Ginger offers another alternative for those looking for good coffee in the evenings. It helps that between them they offer a wide variety of excellent food (and wine) to go with their outstanding coffee.

So, what has changed in the two years since I first went to Foxcroft & Ginger? Well, on the one hand, not a great deal, but on the other hand, quite a bit. Sometimes Coffee Spots re-invent themselves, but, in the case of Foxcroft & Ginger, it’s been a steady evolution, rather than revolution, which has driven change.

September 2016: I’ve heard on the grapevine that Foxcroft & Ginger’s Soho branch has closed, although there’s no official word as to why… Very sad news.

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Boston Tea Party, Salisbury

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The letters BTP (with the B in white, TP in blue) over the words Boston Tea Party (Boston in white, Tea Party in blue)Regular readers will know that I have a love affair with the Boston Tea Party, the West Country chain that started in Bristol in the late 1990s. Indeed, my first ever Coffee Spot was the original on Park Street. So, I thought it was about time I visited what is, quite possibly, the closest Boston Tea Party to my home town of Guildford. It also happens to be, I believe, the biggest and occupies the oldest building, the Grade 1 listed Old George Inn, which dates back to the early 1300s.

As with all the other Boston Tea Parties, it has taken an iconic building and made it its own, unique place. Simultaneously, however, it’s instantly recognisable as a Boston Tea Party, a trick that’s very hard to manage and looks effortless when it’s pulled off.

Sprawling over three floors of a magnificent, historic building, the Salisbury Boston Tea Party boasts over 200 seats upstairs alone, plus an attractive outdoor seating area on the pedestrianised High Street. There’s the usual coffee offering from Bristol-based Extract Coffee Roasters, tea from Bristol-based Canton Tea Co, oodles of cake and an excellent food menu based around several all-day breakfast options.

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TAKK

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Detail from the TAKK sign which hangs outside on Tariff Street: the TAKK logo, a cut-out T over the words "TAKK Coffee House", etched in wood in black .In Manchester’s Northern Quarter, five minutes’ walk from Piccadilly Station, there is an unprepossessing street on which, about half way down, is an unprepossessing store front, part of a tall (four storey) terrace of solid, brick-built buildings. This in turn proclaims itself to be the home of TAKK, a relative newcomer to the Manchester coffee scene. Perhaps this is down to innate modesty (although given the A-boards, I doubt that) or maybe it’s a cunning ploy to lull you into a false sense of security, but the exterior really gives no clues as to the delights that await you when you step inside.

TAKK, which is “Thanks” or “Cheers” in Icelandic, is a friendly, welcoming place, its size concealed by what appears to be a relatively small store front (it’s got roughly the same floor area as Manchester’s North Tea Power). The coffee is excellent, with a bespoke house-blend from Bristol’s Clifton Coffee Roasters (NorthernProjekt) and regularly-rotating single-origins from various guests on filter, with Berlin legends The Barn as a mainstay. Add to that an increasing focus on food, with locally-sourced ingredients, regular specials and simple menus, part of TAKK’s push to be the place for breakfast, lunch and coffee.

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