The Best Coffee Shops in the World
By: Small Certainty
For a while, good coffee became difficult.
You were expected to know the farm, the altitude, the variety, the processing method, and why the cup in front of you was supposed to suggest bergamot or stone fruit. Menus borrowed the language of wine. Baristas became interpreters. A drink that had spent much of its history helping people begin the day sometimes seemed to require preparation of its own.
Much of this was useful. Specialty coffee improved coffee. Roasters became more precise, sourcing became more transparent, and customers learned that beans grown in Ethiopia might taste markedly different from beans grown in Colombia. Producers received more attention and, in the best arrangements, more money. The long chain between a coffee tree and a cup became easier to see.
The problem was never the knowledge. It was the sense that some of it had become the customer’s responsibility.
A coffee shop has another purpose. It is a room in a city. People enter because they are early, tired, meeting someone, putting off going somewhere else, or simply in want of coffee. They read, work, wait, talk, watch the street, and leave. The drink matters enormously, but it is only one part of what makes the place useful.
The best cafés make their expertise recede. Someone has worried about the grinder, the water, the roast, the cups, the lighting, and the height of the counter. By the time the coffee reaches you, most of those decisions have disappeared.
Excellent coffee is now available in an extraordinary number of places. What remains uncommon is a café with a clear idea of itself. Some of the ten here put nearly all of their attention into the cup. Others are inseparable from a particular building, neighborhood, or tradition. One has made matcha and espresso into a house drink. Another has been roasting coffee since 1871.
Good beans are the beginning. A great coffee shop has to make something larger out of them.
1. KOFFEE MAMEYA KAKERU
Tokyo
Koffee Mameya Kakeru gives coffee something it rarely receives: time.
Reservations are made for a counter seat, groups are limited to four, and the table is held for an hour and forty-five minutes. The arrangement immediately removes Kakeru from the usual logic of the café, where speed and turnover tend to shape the experience whether anyone mentions them or not.
Kakeru grew from Eiichi Kunitomo’s original Koffee Mameya in Jingumae, a small shop centered on helping customers choose beans. The second location, opened in a renovated warehouse in Kiyosumi-Shirakawa, develops that exchange into something more elaborate. Coffee can be experienced through different preparations and temperatures, with attention given to how method changes the character of the same ingredient. Monocle described it as an experience closer to fine dining than to an ordinary café.
The comparison is useful up to a point. What distinguishes Kakeru is not luxury so much as concentration. One ingredient is allowed to occupy the better part of two hours. There is nowhere for an elaborate food program or theatrical room to divert the attention.
That degree of focus could easily become exhausting. Coffee already has enough rituals designed to establish who knows more. Kakeru avoids the problem because the knowledge remains in service of the experience. The customer does not need to arrive with a preferred origin, process, or extraction method. Not knowing is allowed.
The long counter gives the exchange structure without making it stiff. You watch, taste, ask questions if you want to, and discover how dramatically a familiar ingredient can change under different conditions.
Few coffee shops could sustain that much attention without becoming tedious. Kakeru can.
2. TIM WENDELBOE
Oslo
Tim Wendelboe’s influence on contemporary coffee is much larger than the small Oslo shop from which much of it began.
Wendelboe started working as a barista in 1998 and opened his own roastery, espresso bar, and training center in Grünerløkka in 2007. The roastery moved a few blocks away in 2018, while the bar remained at Grünersgate 1. The company buys green coffee directly from producers in Kenya, Ethiopia, Colombia, Honduras, and El Salvador, visits them regularly, and publishes what it pays. Since 2019, it has also farmed coffee at Finca El Suelo in Huila, Colombia.
The accumulation of expertise is formidable. What is striking at the espresso bar is how little of it the customer is required to carry.
There are tastings, and there is plenty to learn if you want to learn it. The company is unusually open about farming, soil, cultivars, roasting, and sourcing. But the café itself does not behave as though understanding those things is the price of admission.
Wendelboe’s work at Finca El Suelo makes the underlying ambition unusually clear. Farming, processing, roasting, water, and extraction are all treated as variables worth reconsidering. The complexity keeps moving backward through the system, away from the customer.
At Grünersgate, what remains is a small room and coffee prepared with unusual precision. There is no house spectacle, no elaborate menu structure, and no attempt to disguise the narrowness of the project.
Wendelboe has spent years asking how much better a cup of coffee can become if almost nothing about it is taken for granted.
3. SAWADA COFFEE
Chicago
Sawada Coffee’s signature drink contains matcha, vanilla, espresso, cocoa powder, and milk. It should be too much. It is not.
The Military Latte has become the defining drink at Hiroshi Sawada’s Chicago café. Sawada came to the United States after winning the World Latte Art Championship, but the Green Street shop does not turn that technical pedigree into solemnity. Cortados, cappuccinos, and pour-overs share the menu with matcha, strong drip coffee, Doughnut Vault pastries, and drinks whose appeal is immediate rather than instructional.
The Military Latte matters because it is more than a visual signature. Matcha contributes bitterness and weight, espresso deepens it, and the vanilla and cocoa soften the edges. The combination has lasted because it tastes resolved, not because it photographs well.
That distinction gives Sawada a different character from many of the cafés on this list. Specialty coffee spent years teaching people to remove things from coffee in order to taste it properly. Milk was suspect. Sugar was worse. Flavoring belonged somewhere else entirely. The lesson helped people notice what good beans and careful roasting could do, but purity eventually became a convention of its own.
Sawada has never seemed especially interested in choosing sides. The café can serve a carefully made cortado and a sweet matcha-and-espresso drink with equal conviction. One does not have to validate the other.
The Green Street room follows the same logic. It is darker and more informal than the restrained interiors now associated with specialty coffee, with broad windows onto the street and a visual identity that feels personal rather than standardized.
Chicago already had an important coffee culture before Sawada arrived. What his shop added was not another argument for taking coffee seriously. It was permission to enjoy technical skill without adopting technical seriousness.
The Military Latte remains on the menu. That is evidence enough.
4. MARKET LANE COFFEE
Melbourne
Melbourne has spent enough time caring about coffee that excellent coffee no longer has to announce itself.
Market Lane opened its first shop at the entrance to Prahran Market in 2009. Seventeen years later, the company still describes its ambition in plain terms: source and roast excellent coffee responsibly, then make it easy to understand and enjoy.
The setting of that first shop matters. Prahran is a working food market. People come for vegetables, meat, cheese, bread, and whatever they need for dinner. Coffee enters the routine as another daily purchase rather than as a destination requiring its own vocabulary. A small Probat roaster was installed there from the beginning, placing the production of coffee in view without turning it into theater.
Market Lane has since grown across Melbourne, but the shops tend to respond to their surroundings rather than overwrite them. At Queen Victoria Market, the café occupies a former pharmacy in the Dairy Produce Hall and retains elements of the older site. Elsewhere, the rooms change without losing the underlying character of the company.
That approach suits Melbourne. Coffee here is not a specialist culture waiting to be explained. The city has spent decades making high standards ordinary, to the point that a well-prepared flat white can feel less like an achievement than a reasonable expectation.
Market Lane operates comfortably inside that expectation. Its sourcing and roasting can bear close attention, but the customer does not need to stop and admire the system before ordering.
There is no signature drink or elaborate ritual to explain the appeal. The achievement is repetition: good coffee, made reliably, in places that still belong to the markets and streets around them.
That is a harder standard than novelty.
5. SEY COFFEE
New York
SEY’s laptop policy says more about the café than any description of its furniture could.
Laptop use is limited on weekdays and not permitted on weekends at the Grattan Street shop in Brooklyn. It is a small rule, but it changes the balance of the room. The café remains useful to people who need to work while reserving part of the week for another kind of use.
SEY is a micro-roastery known for light roasting and a close interest in seasonality and origin. The information surrounding its coffees can become highly specific, with details about producer, variety, process, and place. The physical café does not demand the same level of attention from everyone who enters it.
That separation is important.
Many cafés are beautifully designed at seven in the morning and feel like crowded offices by noon. A communal table means one thing when people are talking across it and another when every seat faces a screen. Architecture establishes possibilities, but the way a room is managed determines what eventually happens inside it.
SEY has chosen to treat that as part of hospitality.
The Grattan Street café is bright and open, but its atmosphere does not depend only on pale materials, plants, and daylight. The rules help preserve some social life around the coffee itself.
That makes SEY more interesting than another immaculate specialty roaster. It is not simply asking how coffee should taste. It is also asking what kind of room should exist around it.
A weekend without laptops turns out to be a remarkably effective design decision.
6. COFFEE COLLECTIVE
Copenhagen
Coffee Collective helped make several once-specialized ideas feel ordinary.
Founded in Copenhagen in 2007 by Casper Engel Rasmussen, Klaus Thomsen, and Peter Dupont, the company was built around direct relationships with coffee farmers and a belief that better quality should result in better prices for producers. Its sourcing practices emphasize direct trade, traceability, and transparency.
The more interesting test came later. What happens to those principles once a small, founder-led roaster becomes a larger organization?
Coffee Collective now operates seven coffee bars in Copenhagen and one in Aarhus, alongside a bakery, roastery, wholesale business, webshop, and subscription service. Rebecca Vang became chief executive in 2024 after seventeen years of founder-led management, while the founders remained involved in coffee buying, roasting, sustainability, and quality.
The cafés are where that growth becomes visible without becoming oppressive. They are not replicas. Torvehallerne is an open coffee bar inside a food market. Jægersborggade grew from an early combined roastery and café. Other locations have different proportions and rhythms.
The continuity lies less in repeating one interior than in maintaining the standards behind the counter.
That matters because coffee brands increasingly operate like fashion brands, establishing a visual system strong enough to make every city interchangeable. Coffee Collective has a recognizable identity, but Copenhagen has not been designed out of the shops.
Its approach to sourcing has also become less conspicuous precisely because many of its arguments have been absorbed by the wider industry. Transparency and long-term relationships with producers are no longer unusual things for a specialty roaster to claim.
The more interesting question is whether a company keeps doing the work once the language stops sounding radical.
7. DIE CAFETIÈRE
Vienna
Vienna does not need to be taught how to have a coffee.
Die Cafetière understands this. The small café on Wipplingerstraße occupies a former Naber coffee bar from the period when compact espresso bars were appearing alongside the city’s grander coffeehouses. Peggy Strobel reopened it in 2023, retaining details including the Naber signage and brass-edged bar while updating what is served there.
That sounds obvious until one considers how often renovations remove exactly what made a room specific. Old fittings are cleared, surfaces are simplified, and an address in Vienna, Chicago, or Lisbon returns looking broadly like the same new café.
Die Cafetière moves in the other direction. A Wiener melange can remain on the menu while newer coffee habits enter beside it. The old Naber identity can stay without requiring the operation to behave as though nothing has changed since the middle of the twentieth century.
The distinction is between preservation and continuity. Preservation tends to freeze things. Continuity lets them acquire another layer.
Vienna is particularly suited to the latter. The city already has strong ideas about what cafés are for and how long people should be allowed to occupy them. Contemporary coffee can improve what is in the cup without attempting to redesign the culture around it.
Die Cafetière feels contemporary because it has not tried very hard to look contemporary.
8. ALCHEMIST
Singapore
Alchemist began in Singapore with an unusually sensible ambition: make specialty coffee easier to approach.
The company has grown considerably. Its current store directory lists sixteen locations in Singapore, three in Tokyo, and three in Taipei. The expansion has not been accompanied by a demand that every shop reproduce one interior. Newer locations respond to their buildings, from reclaimed timber and material made with coffee waste in Kyobashi to a traditional Japanese-style house in Taipei’s Da’an district.
The architectural flexibility reflects the coffee program.
Alchemist’s range moves from house blends to more distinctive single-origin coffees. Descriptions are specific without becoming intimidating: plum, fig, hazelnut, bergamot, peach tea. Customers who want more information can find it, but the basic language remains usable.
This is a more interesting version of approachability than simply making everything familiar. The complexity remains in the sourcing, roasting, and preparation. It is simply not transferred wholesale to the transaction.
Singapore is an apt place for that philosophy. The city already contains several strong coffee traditions, from kopi counters to contemporary specialty cafés. A modern roaster enters a culture with its own habits and expectations rather than creating coffee culture from scratch.
Alchemist’s best quality is therefore less visible than any particular interior or bean. It knows how much information to bring forward and how much to keep behind the counter.
That is a useful form of confidence.
9. LALERE
Zürich
The most revealing detail at Lalere is the counter.
It curves through the room rather than establishing a hard line between staff on one side and customers on the other. Eric and Luca Blum, working with coffee specialist Fabian Gass, designed the Zürich café with that relationship in mind. Much of the wood-lined interior was made specifically for the space, including its plaster and timber details.
Lalere was established in 2024, with Gass and the designers involved from the beginning. That direct relationship between the people responsible for the coffee and the people responsible for the room shows.
Neither discipline appears to have been added after the other was finished.
Contemporary cafés have become reliable showcases for commercial interior design. A handsome room attracts attention before anyone has tasted the coffee, and certain materials now signal seriousness almost as efficiently as a logo.
Lalere avoids becoming a collection of those signals. The timber, plaster, counter, and proportions are restrained enough to recede once the room fills.
The curved counter is the clearest example. Its value is not simply sculptural. It changes the sightlines, softens the division between staff and customers, and makes the space slightly more conducive to conversation.
That is a better standard for café design than novelty.
A room should still work after you have stopped looking at it.
10. KURUKAHVECI MEHMET EFENDI
Istanbul
In nineteenth-century Istanbul, coffee was generally sold green. The buyer roasted the beans at home, ground them by hand, and then prepared the coffee.
Mehmet Efendi altered that sequence. After taking over his father’s spice business in 1871, he began roasting and grinding the coffee before selling it, packing the finished product into small paper bags for customers. The convenience made him known as Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi, Coffee Roaster Mehmet Efendi.
The business has endured through several generations of the family and remains headquartered on the site of the original shop on Tahmis Street. The Art Deco building that stands there today was commissioned by Mehmet Efendi’s sons, and the logo created for the company in 1932 remains in use.
Those details place the company in a different historical register from everything else here.
Contemporary coffee culture can have a short memory. Its standard account begins with third-wave roasting, direct trade, lighter profiles, single origins, and renewed interest in manual brewing. Those developments changed coffee for the better, but they arrived centuries after coffeehouses had already become part of Istanbul’s social life.
Kurukahveci Mehmet Efendi is not included simply because it is old. Age alone is not a recommendation. What matters is the continuity between a product, a business, and a way of drinking coffee that remains part of ordinary life.
The company now exports widely and uses modern production methods, but Turkish coffee remains at the center of its identity. The small cup has not become a historical demonstration.
Ending here changes the scale of the list. Koffee Mameya’s rituals are contemporary, but the idea that coffee might deserve a ritual is not. SEY worries about what strangers do in a shared room, a question coffeehouses have been answering for centuries. The newest cafés are still working with an old invention.
These cafés do not agree on very much. Koffee Mameya slows coffee down until it approaches a tasting menu. Market Lane folds it into a trip to the market. Wendelboe follows the cup back to the farm. Sawada mixes espresso with matcha and sees no reason to apologize for it. Die Cafetière lets a Viennese coffee bar acquire another decade rather than starting over.
That variety is reassuring.
The coffee world has become very good at reproducing signs of quality: the right grinder, the right machine, the right roast, the right ceramics, the right timber, the right typeface. None of them guarantees a place worth returning to.
A coffee shop begins with very little. Coffee, someone to prepare it, someone who wants to drink it, and perhaps somewhere to sit. Everything after that is a decision.
The best places make those decisions carefully enough that eventually you stop noticing them.