Editorial guides

Editorial guides to specialty coffee and curated bars worldwide.

• Tokyo cafe rules: one drink per person, time limits and more
  Deep Dive · 2 min read

  Do you have to order a drink in a Tokyo cafe? Often, and food alone may not count. Here are the rules, why they exist, and how to get past them.

• Three of Taipei's four coffee shops are run by champions. You can taste which one isn't.
  City Guide · 3 min read

  Four reviews into Taipei, and three of the shops are run by a World Barista Champion, a Nordic Roasting Champion, or a nationally known latte artist. The coffee axis is the one place that pedigree actually shows up as a number.

• A home barista can throw away a bad shot. A cafe barista rarely can.
  Trend · 3 min read

  The real advantage was never the machine. It is the freedom to throw away a bad shot and try again, something no cafe pulling hundreds of shots a day can afford to do.

• Naha's best coffee is in its smallest rooms.
  City Guide · 2 min read

  Five reviews into Naha's coffee scene, and the pattern already holds: the smaller and stranger the room, the better the coffee.

• Shimokitazawa has more cafes than anywhere else in Tokyo.
  Deep Dive · 5 min read

  Twelve reviewed cafes and bars in one neighbourhood, more than anywhere else in our Tokyo catalog, and also home to one of only four venues citywide we have scored under 7.

• Mexico City's best drink is a cocktail. Its best coffee isn't far behind.
  Deep Dive · 4 min read

  Licorería Limantour has been on the World's 50 Best Bars list every year since 2014. A bakery counter in Granada scores four tenths of a point behind it, on the same scale.

• Lisbon's brunch rooms take the coffee seriously. Tokyo's often don't.
  Comparison · 5 min read

  Two cities, twenty-one brunch rooms, and a gap that runs the opposite way to what you would expect from the coffee each city is famous for.

• Tokyo's best-looking rooms usually have the coffee to match. A few really don't.
  Deep Dive · 4 min read

  We score the room and the cup as separate things, so we can check whether one predicts the other. Across 153 Tokyo venues it barely does, which makes the handful of dramatic misses worth knowing by name.

• Tokyo's matcha moved into the coffee shops
  Trend · 5 min read

  Not one of the matcha specialists we have reviewed in Tokyo is a tea house. They are coffee bars, a converted bathhouse, a guitar brand's cafe, and now a shisha bar.

• Where to work in Tokyo: the one cafe in four that actually lets you
  Deep Dive · 3 min read

  More than half the cafes we have reviewed in Tokyo have no wifi. Three in five would rather you did not open a laptop. About one in four clears both.

• Every venue we've reviewed in Oslo is a Steep Pick.
  City Guide · 3 min read

  Three specialty venues reviewed in Oslo. All three are Steep Picks, and all three are run by people with an actual world championship behind them. Here is a city where the middle tier never got a chance to exist.

• How to read a coffee bag
  Deep Dive · 4 min read

  Four fields on every bag tell you almost everything about what's in the cup: roast date, origin, processing, and roast level. Here's what each one actually means, and how to read a shelf of bags in under a minute.

• Bangkok's roasteries are building something the rest of Asia isn't.
  Trend · 5 min read

  In under a decade, Bangkok built a microroastery scene with world-competition credentials and a globally-ranked specialty cafe. It didn't need to be this good this fast.

• Best 5 cafes to sit, sip, and linger in Tokyo
  List · 4 min read

  Not every cafe in this city invites you to stay. These five do.

• The best coffee in Madrid isn't in Malasaña anymore.
  City Guide · 6 min read

  Spain has one of the most embedded cafe cultures in the world, which made specialty coffee harder to introduce, and then made it more interesting to watch. The scene has since spread well past the neighbourhood that started it. Here is where the best of it is now.

• The fourth wave of coffee is not about the coffee
  Deep Dive · 3 min read

  Third wave built the best craft the industry had ever seen. It also built rooms that felt cold. The next shift is not technical. It is human.

• Third wave coffee had four birthplaces.
  Deep Dive · 3 min read

  Four cities, one term coined in San Francisco from observations of Norwegian barista culture, and a coffee scene in Melbourne that nobody was watching. The origin story is messier than anyone admits.

• The cafes in Porto and Lisbon blurring the line between espresso bar and wine bar
  Trend · 3 min read

  A generation of specialty roasters arrived with a different idea about what a day could look like. The natural wine crowd had the same idea from the other direction. They found each other.

• The 9 Best Cafes for Solo Work in Lisbon
  List · 3 min read

  By someone who took the research seriously. Verified addresses, confirmed WiFi, and one honest qualifier at the end.

• Why Tokyo's kissaten culture is the world's most quietly radical cafe movement
  Deep Dive · 3 min read

  The old-school coffee shops that refused to modernise are now more radical than anything the third wave ever attempted.

• Bangkok's Ari neighborhood is a one-hour specialty coffee education
  City Guide · 4 min read

  From the roaster that rewrote the Thai origin story to a coffee stand inside a weekend market, Ari gives you the full picture in under an hour.

• Seoul vs Melbourne: which city has the more interesting specialty scene right now?
  Comparison · 4 min read

  Melbourne still wins the argument on the average cup. But interesting is a different question from better, and the answer is less obvious than it used to be.

• The Tokyo cocktail bar that built a concept, and why it matters
  Trend · 4 min read

  A new generation of Tokyo bars built their rooms around a governing idea rather than a drinks list. The altitude, the cacao, the sound system, the season. The concept is not the backdrop. It is the reason the room exists.