Specialty coffee in Barcelona

“Why buy it if you can make it?” Such is the philosophy at Caravelle, a creative café and restaurant on Pintor Fortuny. The brainchild of Zim and Poppy, an Australian-British couple who owned gastropubs in London before coming to Barcelona, this place pairs a minimalist, seemingly effortless style with a varied American-European menu based on homemade ingredients.

Hot sauces, jam, ice cream, cola, craft beer… it’s all made from scratch, and it all tastes amazing. The menu changes seasonally, but must-tries have included the mouthwatering fried chicken, slow-cooked carnitas tacos, double cheeseburger or salmon poké bowl. The Full Spanglish brunch (available in veggie form too) will make your weekend – pair it with a flat white from the La Marzocco machine.

And it’s never too early for Caravelle’s own craft beer – Galactic pale ale, Mixtape New-World Pilsner, Midnight IPA, or many more – all brewed onsite with brewmaster Ben.

If you care about coffee in Barcelona, the trail leads back to Cafés El Magnífico. The Sans family was roasting beans and pulling serious espresso here long before the specialty boom swept the city – the original article, the OGs, and still the benchmark everyone else measures up to. They’ve been on Carrer Argenteria since 1962, and the Born shop is the reference point for beans bought the old way – loose, by weight, chosen after a conversation with someone who actually knows the harvest.

The house calls itself a specialist in roasted coffee, and means it: the work begins at origin, continues in the daily roast and finishes at the counter, where staff talk you through varieties, methods and profiles. Salvador Sans and his team are working cuppers (professional tasters), and it shows in the range – the classics that built the brand sit beside a selection that rotates each month as new origins and exceptional lots arrive. Decide between a single origin and a blend, pick your method, and they’ll grind to match.

The takeaway espresso is the real argument – loyalists rate it among the best in the city – and you can carry home a bag and the kit to brew it: Aeropress, V60, French press, the lot. Next door, sister house Sans & Sans has done for tea since 1993 what El Magnífico does for coffee. Sixty years on, the family is still raising Barcelona’s coffee game one bag at a time.

Matcha gets thrown around a lot these days, usually whisked from a tin of who-knows-what. Bonsai Matxa i Cafè takes it more seriously than most. This Eixample café, on Carrer Casanova, treats matcha as a ritual rather than a trend: first-harvest ceremonial powder sourced straight from Japan, stone-ground to order, with none of the bitterness that gives the cheap stuff a bad name.

The house line tells the story – the smooth, best-selling Asahi alongside the Zen and Yuhi blends – and you can drink it in or carry a tin home with a whisk to start your own. But the café side pulls its weight too: properly made espresso and milk drinks for anyone who hasn’t gone green, served in a calm, plant-flecked room that’s become a small Eixample favorite.

Shade-grown, stone-ground, whisked with care – it’s the rare place that treats a bowl of matcha with the same respect a good barista gives the bean. Order the Asahi and see what the fuss is about.

“Knowing when and where to stop makes the difference” – a fitting motto for a place called Paradero (a stopping point). On Comte Borrell, at the edge of Sant Antoni, it’s earned a steady weekend line for doing two things well at once: serious specialty coffee and a brunch worth lingering over.

The coffee comes from local and international roasters, pulled on La Marzocco machines, so the cup holds up next to the plate. And the plate is the draw. The kitchen runs a tight, made-to-order menu with plenty for vegetarians and vegans: avo toast on sourdough with guacamole, feta, confit tomato and pomegranate; huevos benedictinos on brioche; Turkish eggs poached into spiced yogurt with smoked paprika and dukkah; a mushroom toast with smoky eggplant and goat cheese. For bigger appetites, the roast beef focaccia with pickled cabbage and Gruyère does the job.

The room is homey and unhurried, which is the point – they don’t take reservations, so turn up early or be ready to wait with a coffee in hand. Worth the pause.

The Greek kafeneio is the village coffee house – the social heart of the place, where the day slows and people actually talk. Kafenion carries that idea from the island of Salamina, where it began, to a corner of the Eixample by way of stops in Amsterdam and Utrecht.

The result is a hybrid the founders sum up as “Greek passion, Dutch dedication, Spanish spirit,” built on the Greek notion of meraki – doing something with care and soul. In practice that means seriously good specialty coffee served in a room that wants you to linger, and one of the warmer welcomes you’ll find on a busy Barcelona street. It’s become one of the most beloved cafés in the neighborhood, the sort of place that turns first-timers into regulars fast.

Pull up, order a coffee, and settle in. That’s rather the whole point.

“Nice people drink good coffee” is the cheerful creed at Ripa, and the crowd packing this Eixample microroastery seems happy to prove it. It’s one of the most popular specialty spots in the city, and unlike most cafés on this list, Ripa roasts the beans it pours – so what’s in your cup was likely roasting nearby a few days earlier.

The menu runs on single origins that rotate with what’s good – beans from Cajamarca, the Cerrado, the Huila highlands of Colombia and beyond – pulled as tight flat whites or poured long and cold. A case of pastries backs it up; the cinnamon rolls and banana bread have their own fan club. The room is bright and design-led, the kind of bench-and-counter setup made for a morning that drifts longer than planned.

For all the polish, there’s nothing precious about it. Order a flat white, grab a roll, and join the nice people. Good coffee, as promised.

“Good things happen after coffee,” goes the line at Noor, and the little group has built a Barcelona following on exactly that promise. The Sant Pere Més Baix location sits on one of the old town’s prettiest pedestrian streets, a plant-filled, light-flooded room designed to slow you down rather than turn you over.

The coffee is the foundation – flat whites and espresso pulled by trained baristas – but Noor casts wider than that. There’s a much-loved blueberry matcha for the green-tea crowd, smoothies, and a case of handmade pastries that make it easy to turn a quick cup into a proper sit. The aesthetic is unmistakable across all their spots: greenery, soft materials, a sense that the room was composed rather than decorated.

It’s less a roastery than a refuge, the kind of corner you duck into for a flat white and stay in far longer than planned. Warm, simple and genuinely welcoming – the rare specialty café that feels like a ritual.

Hidden down a narrow lane near Santa Maria del Mar, Hidden Coffee Roasters lives up to its name – though plenty of people in the Born have found it. This is the most central outpost of a homegrown roaster that has quietly spread across the city, from Les Corts and Sant Gervasi to its roastery on the edge of town.

They roast their own, and take it seriously: espresso, filter and drip built from beans sourced with real care – the standout Coyote, from El Salvador, scores 91 out of 100 on the cupping scale used to grade specialty coffee, where 80 clears the “specialty” bar and anything past 90 is genuinely rare. There’s matcha for the non-coffee crowd, and bags to take home for anyone who wants to keep the habit going between visits. The brand runs a coffee subscription and a “School of Coffee” for regulars who want to brew like the baristas, and leans hard into community – customers are la familia Hidden, and it shows in the welcome.

The Born room is small and easy to miss. Find it, order a filter, and you’ll understand why its fans keep coming back.

Most specialty cafés hand you a coffee and leave it at that. Àmbar wants you to taste the difference. At this small Eixample spot, owner Jianit built the menu around a simple, nerdy pleasure: take a single coffee and try it across different extraction methods, side by side, to learn what the bean actually does in the cup.

The beans come mainly from Jaleo Coffee Roasters, rounded out by a rotating cast of guest roasters, so the lineup keeps moving. Order an espresso and a filter of the same origin and the contrast does the teaching – the same coffee can read like two different drinks depending on how it’s pulled or poured. It’s the kind of place that turns a quick cortado into a small education, without any of the snobbery that sometimes comes with it.

The room is calm and unfussy, the service genuinely warm, and the dog at your feet is invited too. A proper specialty bar for people who want to understand what they’re drinking – or just drink something very good.

The Raval isn’t short on noise, but it is short on calm. Enter Departure Coffee Co. – a little oasis down one of the quarter’s tiny side streets, equal parts coffee bar and art gallery. Xavi and Raquel opened it in 2017 inside a former carpentry workshop and left the bones intact: raw, pared-back, high-ceilinged, the kind of room that rewards an hour with a notebook. The walls earn their keep too, with exhibitions that turn over every few weeks.

The coffee is the serious draw. They pour beans from local roaster SlowMov, dialing each one to its own temperature curve to coax the flavors out of the cup, and brew across V60, pour-over, cold brew and espresso. The result is consistently rated among the best in the neighborhood – careful, unfussy, made by people who clearly care. For anyone who wants to go past drinking it, they run courses in the craft of specialty coffee.

It’s not a place that announces itself, and that’s rather the point. Those in the know slip in for a quiet, properly made cup, a look at whatever’s on the walls, and a corner to get some work done. A genuine departure from the chaos outside.

For decades, drinking Cafés El Magnífico meant a takeaway cup from the Born or a bag of beans to brew at home. Their newest shop, on Rambla de Catalunya, finally gives the 60-year-old roaster a proper bar to sit at – and brings coffee and tea under one roof for the first time.

The centerpiece is a La Marzocco Modbar, the first pour-over system of its kind installed in Barcelona. Built into the counter rather than looming over it, it strips away the usual barrier between barista and customer: you sit across from the person brewing and watch a filter coffee dialed in, cup by cup, with the precision the method asks for. The idea is simple – let people taste the range the house spends its year sourcing and roasting. Order off the classics that made the name or the monthly rotating origins, and ask questions; that’s the point.

Sharing the space is sister house Sans & Sans, the Barcelona tea firm the family has run since 1993. Pioneers of the pyramid tea bag here and of the city’s tea-bar format, they bring a sensory selection from prestigious gardens – the Atelier collection of pure teas and infusions among them – for anyone who’d rather steep than sip espresso. Pour-over, beans, tea and a stool to enjoy it all from. About time.

“Feel good. Be good.” is the tagline of Barcelona’s newest brunch spot. The Egg Lab, the first completely egg-based restaurant in Barcelona, now has three locations in the city: Sepúlveda, Bruc and Lluís el Piadós.

Its mission is simple: to offer a sustainable, healthy and unique brunch. To this end, they collaborate with local producers and artisans (their free-range eggs come from the Sant Lluís farm in Dosrius and the bread is made at the Forn de Sant Josep). And, of course, a good brunch always starts with a good coffee. Their supplier is the Tornado Coffee Roasters, a micro-roaster in Granollers, that roasts coffee exclusively for them.

Starting with two main ingredients – eggs and bread – this bruncherie shows that even with the simplest of ingredients, we can enjoy an exceptionally varied and delectable menu. If one of the eight different egg sandwiches doesn’t do it for you, we recommend trying the sweet apple pancakes or the french toast.

If you haven’t yet been to La Papa, you’re seriously missing out. One of the newest and most aesthetically pleasing additions to the city, this cafe-cum-brunch place is a must visit.

Aside from being beautifully designed and decorated, it is also incredibly conscious in its approach to sustainable living. Some of the highlights on the menu include the waffles, French toast, mushroom ceviche, avocado and eggs on toast, and the labneh. What’s more, there are gluten free and vegan options and they can adapt the meals to suit your diet preferences and allergies – simply ask at the counter. Wash it all down with a kombucha or specialty coffee – or gin and tonic if you fancy it – and you’re good to go.

Aside from the main cafe space, through to the back there is a little market selling sustainable clothing and homeware.

Tucked away in the lesser-known corner of Galvany in Sant Gervasi, within strolling distance from Gràcia, Rex Café is a suitably charming space in which to work, socialize and indulge your senses.

Sink into one of the plush, red velvet chairs to start your day with specialty coffee, ham-and-cheese-stuffed croissants and tostados adorned with fresh avocado and scrumptious scrambled eggs. The excellent selection of cakes, cookies and double-choc brownies also make this a great spot for a merienda between meals. And if you hang around long enough, you can explore the stellar selection of local wines and craft beers.

All in all, this cool but quaint little café is the perfect antidote to the maddening summer crowds elsewhere in the city – an oasis of calm you may well want to keep to yourself.

Just when you thought you’ve seen everything when it comes to brunch in Barcelona, the Little Fern café opened its doors. It’s refreshingly out of place smack in the middle of Poblenou, giving off an authentic, New Zealand-vibe with a nod to the island’s famous café culture.

It’s not just the décor and the attention to detail that sets Little Fern apart. The menu is different, too, offering dishes like the pea and avocado smash with cashew mint pesto and poached eggs, or the charred-corn fritter stack. Oh, and those kimchi pancakes – a perfect blend of sweet and sour with a kick of probiotics from the world’s healthiest fermented food.

If you manage to take your eyes off the simple but glorious food creations, make sure you get a hot drink, too. Nothing beats a creative New Zealand-style coffee or a matcha latte. If you’re in for a special treat, give the turmeric or the charcoal latte a go.

You will find the relocated Syra Coffee shop on a side street off the creaky looking, old Mercat de l’Abaceria Central (currently under renovation) in Gracìa. It’s small in size, more of a large hallway, culminating in a theatrical black curtain.

Coffee is served only in brown, to go-cups emblazoned with a bolt of lightning. There is a well-curated offering of pastries to go along with a cup of coffee: large cookies that come in flavors like Matcha or red velvet, or sugar-glazed donuts from Lukumás. Syra have their own zine where they showcase the local artists that are their patrons, as well as the back story on the coffee beans they feature on a given month.

Expect to find a steady stream of students flowing in and out of the shop throughout the day, leaving an animated buzz after a welcome hit of caffeine.

Hidden on a quiet street behind the Rambla del Raval, Morning Glory is the kind of place you’re glad you stumbled on. It’s a small, eco-minded brunch café in one of the city’s most diverse quarters, built around healthy, ecological food and craft coffee – a calm start to the day a few steps from the bustle of the Rambla.

Owners Juanma and Rocio Peñalver run it with evident care. Beyond the expected avo toast and eggs Benedict, the menu leans on quiches, pastries and tarts homemade by Rocio’s mother, the sort of from-scratch baking that’s harder to find than it should be. There’s a serious tea program too, with high-quality Japanese and Moroccan leaves for anyone who wants something other than coffee, and the cooking keeps a green, seasonal bent throughout.

It’s as much a neighborhood hub as a café. The week carries a rotating roster of events – early-morning yoga on Saturdays for the disciplined, live music scattered through the week for everyone else – giving the room a looser, more communal feel than the average brunch spot. Those after a fresh, unhurried way to start the day will find it more than worth seeking out.

The aptly named Three Marks Coffee (after founders Marco, Marco and Marc) is the latest installment in Barcelona’s craft coffee craze. Two of the partners bring their coffee expertise from Nømad while the third is the design wizard behind their savvy branding.

All three are dedicated to brewing up excellent coffee for a new audience in the barrio of Fort Pienc, well insulated from hipsterdom. Their goal is to promote high-quality coffee culture and to reach uninitiated locals curious about the new venture. For now, the shop sells small batch coffee – including affogatos and frapettos – a variety of homemade kombuchas and herbal tisanes, and a few gorgeous pastries like caramel, apple and amaranth biscuit with red fruits jam and matcha or chocolate cake.

Eventually, the offering will expand to include a fuller food menu featuring sandwiches and other lunch items as well as craft beers.

Demonstrating just how firmly Barcelona’s specialty coffee scene has taken root, you can now enjoy proper coffee pretty much anywhere. Point in case: Morrow Coffee. Nuzzled away near Las Arenas shopping mall in Plaça Espanya, an area rarely praised for its hipsterdom, this stylish space is 100% cool café.

Single-source beans are freshly roasted on-site and expertly ground to craft espresso, Aeropress, V60 and Chemex-based beauties. There’s also a selection of matcha, Japanese and Chinese loose-leaf teas, as well as natural juices, Catalan craft beers and organic wines. A selection of artisanal croissants ensure breakfast is always treat, while the hearty sandwiches hit the spot at any time of day. You’ll also find craft cakes and chunky American-style cookies to complete the experience.

Most importantly, the staff are passionate about what they do and go out of their way to offer personal and attentive service. A beautiful place to get your caffeinated buzz on.

Italian barista Iker Zago honed his craft in cafes from Australia to London before planting roots with his very own specialty coffee haven in Eixample. The design itself is stunning with its hefty wooden tables and flamboyant teal and crimson color palette.

A true pro, Iker perfects each cup with immense care and attention to detail, working with a cherry-picked roster of roasters from Gardelli in Italy and Familia Osorio in Barcelona. Pair your coffee with fresh pastries, bagels, sandwiches and salads. Healthy options include cold-pressed juices, açaí bowls and yogurt with fruit and muesli, although you’d have to be made of stone to be able to resist the tempting carrot cake and chocolate brownies!

Well played, Iker. Well played.

Free pouring LDN caffeine-cool into BCN’s comparably small coffee scene, Nømad was originally a market stall in East London. This is what happened when Spanish Barista Champion Jordi Mestre came home to roast, setting up shop (and lab) near Santa Caterina, “a place to taste coffee.”

Serving his own Guatemala-Brazil blend from a replica of a barista judging panel, Jordi gets off on getting enthusiasts coffee-high on his own supply. Shop from flat whites, filter, seasonal harvests, coffee bags, espressos or “as much coffee as you dare for two people.” For the lab, join training and cupping workshops.

Just don’t expect cake, sugar, tables or toilets. The quality bean hunter-gatherer serves his Manifesto brew with a glass of water. “I don’t want to change the world, just offer an alternative. There’s a different, better way to drink coffee.” A manifesto for every coffee lover. London’s loss.