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.
In most of Spain, ordering coffee is a fast transaction. You stand at the bar, you order a café con leche or a cortado, you drink it in three minutes, and you leave. The barista does not ask what grind setting you prefer. You did not come to discuss it. This is not a criticism of how Spanish people drink coffee. It is a description of a culture that has been confident in itself for a very long time.
Madrid's specialty scene arrived into exactly this, and it arrived carefully.
Toma Café opened in 2011 on Calle de la Palma in Malasaña, run by two people who had spent years in advertising and years flying to other European cities for decent coffee before deciding to make the thing they kept looking for. The room was small. The menu was short. The coffee was genuinely good in a way that the rest of the neighborhood had not been expecting. They did not make a performance of it.
The specialty cafes that have lasted in Madrid did not try to convert anyone. They just made better coffee and let the room figure itself out.
That early restraint shaped what came after. A decade on, the specialty scene in Madrid is less evangelical than Oslo, less busy than London, and considerably less self-conscious than Berlin. It has absorbed something from the city it sits inside: a conviction that the social function of a cafe matters as much as what is in the cup, and that you should be able to order a cortado without anyone making you feel like you have missed the point.
What has changed since is where the good coffee actually is. Toma Café and the cafe it helped set the tone for are both still worth the visit, but most of what has earned a Steep Pick in Madrid since has opened somewhere else.
The neighborhoods worth knowing
Malasaña is where it started, and the streets around Calle de la Palma and the San Bernardo corridor still have the highest density of specialty options in the city. It is the neighborhood where Madrid's creative class has concentrated for forty years, and the cafes there have the energy of a place that still has something to prove. Toma Café and HanSo Café both hold up that end of the deal, HanSo drawing a genuine weekend queue and Toma still roasting out of the same small room it opened in. Neither is the strongest cup in the city right now.
Conde Duque sits directly west of Malasaña and tends to get fewer visitors for the same quality of coffee. The streets are quieter, the buildings older, and the cafes there feel less like they need to announce themselves. Misión Café is here, and it remains the best argument for crossing from one neighborhood into the other.
La Latina is different in character entirely. South of the center, it is the neighborhood of El Rastro, the flea market that takes over the streets on Sunday mornings and spills into the bars by noon. Ruda Café sits a few blocks from the market traffic, hidden in the narrow streets, and it is one of the more interesting specialty cafes in the city partly because nothing about its location suggests it should be there.
A short walk away is Lavapiés, and inside it, Hola Coffee Fourquet, the original 2017 flagship of a brand that has since opened a second Madrid location. It was started by Pablo Caballero, the 2016 Spanish Barista Champion, and Nolo Botana, both of them Toma Café alumni before they left to build something of their own. Seating is genuinely limited, which is the one honest caveat, but the coffee here scores higher than anywhere else in this guide. A decade after Toma Café opened in Malasaña, two of the people who trained there are now pulling the best shot in the city, on the opposite side of it.
Goya and the wider Salamanca district to the east are the upscale barrios, where the cafes serve a different clientele and the interiors are correspondingly polished. Cero Coffee Roasters handles that territory well, sourcing seriously even when the cup does not always land. A few streets over on Calle de Serrano, in the middle of the neighborhood's shopping strip, Honest Greens Serrano proves the same point from an unlikely angle. It is a healthy-food restaurant first, bowls and avocado toast, and the coffee program bolted onto it turned out to be good enough to be the actual reason to go.
Where to go
- Toma CaféMalasaña · Madrid · Steep Index 7.8/10
One of the original specialty roasteries in Madrid, running out of a small Malasaña room since 2011. The flat white is honest, the cinnamon pastry will cost you a second coffee, and the solo experience is better than most.
- HanSo CaféMalasaña · Madrid · Steep Index 8.0/10
A small, stylish Malasaña café that has earned a genuine neighbourhood following, with coffee and food that justify the queue. Go with company and budget time for the wait.
- Misión Café Steep PickConde Duque · Madrid · Steep Index 8.5/10
A specialty café and bakehouse in Conde Duque with a direct-trade coffee programme, a cortado worth going out of your way for, and avocado toast made from bread they baked that morning.
- Ruda Café Steep PickLa Latina / Lavapiés · Madrid · Steep Index 8.5/10
A small specialty café hidden in the narrow streets of La Latina, near the Rastro market, with rotating single-origin coffees and baristas who can actually tell you why they chose the beans on the counter.
- Hola Coffee Fourquet Steep PickLa Latina / Lavapiés · Madrid · Steep Index 8.6/10
A small, easy-to-miss specialty cafe in Lavapiés, run by a Spanish Barista Champion, and one of the more serious coffee stops in Madrid.
- Cero Coffee RoastersGoya · Madrid · Steep Index 7.9/10
A specialty roaster and takeout counter in Salamanca with solid single-origin sourcing and an owner who knows the supply chain from seed to cup. The cup on this visit did not quite match the conversation.
- Honest Greens Serrano Steep PickRecoletos, Salamanca · Madrid · Steep Index 8.5/10
A healthy-food restaurant with a coffee program good enough to be the actual reason to visit, tucked into one of Madrid's most upscale shopping streets.
- Salmon Guru Steep PickBarrio de las Letras · Madrid · Steep Index 8.5/10
A World's 50 Best Bar in Barrio de las Letras, where seasonal menus and vibrant interiors back up the ranking without making you feel like you are paying for the accolades.
The evening
Madrid's cafe culture and its bar culture were always closely related. The city that drinks coffee standing at a bar in the morning is the same city that drinks wine and vermouth at noon and cocktails until three in the morning. The line between these things is not a line in Madrid so much as a gradient.
Salmon Guru, in Barrio de las Letras, is the argument for not going home after the last coffee. It operates in a former pharmacy a few streets from where Lope de Vega lived, and it is one of the better cocktail bars in Europe. The menu runs long and the room runs late. The clientele is not the same crowd from Misión Café at ten in the morning, but there is more overlap than you would expect.
What the city is now
Madrid is not trying to become the world's reference city for specialty coffee. The cafes worth visiting here are interesting precisely because they did not attempt to overwrite what was already there. The old cafe culture did not disappear. It just got better coffee, and it got better coffee in more places than the one neighborhood that started it.
You can still order a cortado standing at the bar at Ruda Café or Hola Coffee Fourquet, and nobody is going to look at you strangely. That sounds like a small thing. In specialty coffee, it is not.