We’re in Melbourne for the 2013 World Barista Championship, our first visit to this splendid city. How do you write a guide for a city if you’ve never been? Easy. We polled a dozen Melbourne residents and frequent visitors with excellent taste on their very favorite places to eat, drink, and have a coffee around town. Read more features like this one in our Melbourne Sprudge Guides hub!

Melbourne is one heck of a classy town, with world class restaurants, gorgeously fitted cafes and brunch palaces, and no shortage of classy establishments at which to enjoy classic cocktails and sublime wines. But you know what? Sometimes you just need a pub. Sometimes jeans and hoodie need to be okay. Sometimes you want a burger and a beer, and you don’t want to break the bank.

You do you, that’s what we always say. So here’s a list of some of Melbourne’s finest pubs and local haunts, where the air is never fussy, and if you hang ’round long enough everyone will know your name.

The Standard – One of Melbourne’s classic laneway pubs, The Standard was home to a very hip record label in the 1990′s, and today sports authentic mid-century ephemera decor and a by-all-accounts gorgeous outdoor garden. Beer, wine, pub grub til late (sausage rolls!), and not an ounce of nonsense. (293 Fitzroy St, Fitzroy)

The Beaufort – We visited the Beaufort on our first night out in Melbourne, on the overwhelming recommendation of several poll responders. She’s a charmer, alright, situated on the corner of a long, palm tree studded boulevard you could easily mistake for Dolores Street in San Francisco. The vibe feels like the Mission District, too, or maybe SE Portland, or Bushwick, or you get the picture. A dive by presentation but not by menu, as the Beaufort sports a deep, well-considered Scotch selection (!) plus inventive beer cocktails and loads of American bourbons. This is clearly one of Melbourne’s young, hip after-work shared spaces, and quite popular with baristas. We loved it! (421 Rathdowne St, Carlton)

Huxtaburger / Bill’s Bar – Melbourne is, improbably, something of a hamburger town, and several people mentioned Huxtaburger as being home to one of the city’s best. They have gluten free buns, a jalapeno and sriracha mayo option, and a fun pub ’round back where every last pour of liquor – from fancy Scotch to cheap hooch – goes for $9 a pour. Lots of bar snacks, too, and we could go on and on, but this place sounds awesome. (106 Smith Street, Collingwood)

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We’re in Melbourne for the 2013 World Barista Championship, our first visit to this splendid city. How do you write a guide for a city if you’ve never been? Easy. We polled a dozen Melbourne residents and frequent visitors with excellent taste on their very favorite places to eat, drink, and have a coffee in the city. Read more features like this one in our Melbourne Sprudge Guides hub!

Because drinking and coffee events go perilously hand in hand, there may be no more important guide than this one. Like our dining, coffee, breaky and pub guides, it was an exercise in controlled impossibility to narrow down this city’s choices of great bars into 10 recommended spots. But fortunately the folks we polled all seemed to be in agreement on the basics – wine here is awesome, cocktails are great, and the great beer options abound. Be sure to consult our other guides in addition to this, as there’s quite a bit of crossover between restaurants and bars in this fair city.

But seriously, on the wine thing, it’s almost as though Aussies take their plethora of delicious wines for granted. It’s gobsmacking how much great wine there is to drink here. Even if you aren’t a wine drinker by default, try it out. Take a chance and you may well be handsomely rewarded.

The Aylesbury (103 Lonsdale Street) – Melbourne is a wine town, and the Aylesbury is a great spot to dig in to that scene. Their wine list has what you’re expecting – carefully curated Shiraz choices from the Yarra Valley, Pinots from Yarra and elsewhere throughout Victoria – as well as some fun designations like “Textured Whites” and “Grenache and Friends”. It’s all about the rooftop seating here, a covered and heated situation where you’re welcome to enjoy a fine cigar, if so inclined.

Black Pearl (304 Brunswick Fitzroy) – A cocktail institution in the middle of Fitzroy that stays low key on weeknights, and becomes something of a suave madhouse on weekends. Order your favorite classic cocktail here and soak in the scenery.

Cumulus Up (45 Flinders Ln) – The upstairs wine bar at Cumulus Inc (featured in our dining guide), this is another top choice in Melbourne’s sprawling dossier of wine destinations. They’ve got a climate controlled cellar to keep their vintages tasting great, and a small plates menu to pair with all that good vino (one of our polling team gushed about the “foie gras waffles”). Esteemed and classy by all accounts.

The Everleigh (1/150-156 Gertrude St, Fitzroy) – Another option for great cocktails, with a beautiful interior, a deep selection of fine spirits, and an overall air of sophistication. This is the sister bar of Milk & Honey in New York City. If the enjoyment of fine cocktails is a component part of how you travel, place this spot high on your list.

Hihou (1 Flinders Ln) – Japanese in spirit and presentation, one must politely ring the bell and be chaperoned up to gain entry at Hihou. Winner of Time Out Melbourne’s “Best New Bar” award for 2012, this place features several Japanese inversions on classic cocktails, plus a deep selection of sake and shochu. And yes, of course there’s tsukemono and sashimi drinking snacks to go alongside your drinks. This is the cocktail arm of Izakaya Den, featured elsewhere in our Melbourne guides.

Lily Blacks (17 Meyers Pl) – A cosmopolitan Melbourne laneway bar, with classics and new creations sharing space on their sprawling, inventive cocktail menu. Expect to pay New York City prices, look for an armada of housemade bitters and tinctures, and geek out about the multifaceted rum and bourbon Old Fashion options. This is probably where we’d go first with our cocktail nerd friends back home.

The Long Play (318 St Georges Rd, Fitzroy) – A cocktail and wine bar in Fitzroy with a miniature cinema in its back room! The interior is all Danish minimalism, there are European apertifs aplenty, and reasonably priced small plates. Nothing too fancy, tastefully appointed, and did we mention the movie theater?

The Melbourne Supper Club (1st/161 Spring St) – Broadsheet Melbourne called this spot “arguably the city’s best bar”, and they’ve got hours til 6am on weekends. Huge wine list, spirits, oysters, and a cigar bar upstairs called Siglo…

Siglo (2/161 Spring St) – The aforementioned rooftop cigar bar above The Melbourne Supper Club. Did you know that Cuban cigars are totally legal in Australia? They’ve got ‘em here, with more detail than you knew imaginable and a humidor to make even the uninitiated curious. Worried about the cold? They’ve got heaters. Just want a drink? Spirits and wine are cheerfully available. Drinking on a budget? Maybe not here you aren’t. Friends with a wealthy coffee magnate? This would be a fine place to suggest.

Whisky & Alement (270 Russell St) – Melbourne might be 10,000 miles from Edinburgh, but that hasn’t slowed down this Scotch spot one bit. They’ve got drams and drams of the good stuff for you to enjoy, plus classes and and regularly scheduled events all year long. Yes, there is Scotch in Melbourne, and it’s here – you knew we’d find it, right?

Loop back ’round to our Melbourne info portal, why don’t you? Good on ya!

The post 10 Places To Drink Fancy In Melbourne: Sprudge Guides appeared first on Sprudge.com.

We’re in Melbourne for the World Barista Championship, our first visit to this splendid city. How do you write a guide for a city if you’ve never been? Easy. We polled a dozen Melbourne residents and frequent visitors with excellent taste on their very favorite places to eat, drink, and have a coffee in the city. Read more features like this one in our Melbourne Sprudge Guides hub!

With a total population of over 4 million, and a reputation as Australia’s cultural hub, you might expect that Melbourne would be home to some pretty awesome restaurants. And you would be right: this was an enormously tough list to whittle down into a top 10, based on the responses of the dozen or so Melbourne locals and frequent visitors we polled. From an incredibly diverse and exciting field of restaurants to choose from, here’s 10 restaurants with very little in common, save for promising you a nice time during your visit. For more choices, spend time with Broadsheet Melbourne, the city’s premiere dining and urban exploring guide.

Cumulus Inc (45 Flinders Ln) – A top pick for the vast majority of people we polled, this destination restaurant on Melbourne’s trendy Flinders Lane has been well-regarded since opening in 2008. Their menu is chockablock Cupidian arrows aimed directly at our Pacific Northwestern hearts: think regional Aussie oysters, epic charcuterie, whole roasted lamb shoulders to share, grilled octopus…we’ll meet you there.

Chin Chin (125 Flinders Ln) – Very busy and not too fancy, with a menu “modeled on the hawker dining halls of Asia”, according to their menu-less website. Broadsheet’s listing for them mentions items like suckling pig pancake rolls, a plethora of Thai-style soups, and a focused wine program. They’re open til late, so consider this a post-party “let’s take a cab, I’m starving” option.

Izakaya Den (114 Russell St) – Located mere blocks from Sensory Lab on the corner of Russel & Little Collins, this is a big city modern Izakaya befitting the bustle and hustle of the CBD. Modeled on the chic urban drink-and-eateries of Tokyo, our responders highlighted the service and sake list here as being especially noteworthy. Be aware: Izakaya Den is located in a basement, and their door is pretty much unmarked, so look closely at the ol’ iPhone. It’s there, promise.

The Town Mouse (312 Drummond St, Carlton) – We’re tempted to call this place “New American”, but that would be blindingly empiricist of us. The Town Mouse has smart wine and food options – “Blackened pork jowl, smoked carrot kimchi, cos, green apple & peanut” FTW – with a focus on local, seasonal goodies. Lots of vegetarian options and delicious sounding meaty entrees, plus its in a hip and fun part of Carlton.

Cookie (First Floor/252 Swanston St) – Contemporary Thai food plus lots and lots of beer. Deep fried shrimp cocktail! Soft shell crab! Seriously, they have like 200 beers. This place sounds awesome and we’re going, that’s final.

Anada (197 Gertrude St, Fitzroy) – Spanish tapas and raciones, with a super-affordable tasting menu that sounds like a lot of fun. There’s a really deep cheese list here too, if you’re into that, and a well-curated not-too-intimidating list of Spanish sherries, ciders, and wines. Sounds like a fun spot for that big group dinner you’re tagging along with. Lucky you.

Dainty Sichuan (176 Toorak Rd, South Yarra) – No foolies, this place is home for real-deal Sichuan spice euphoria. Everything you order here will be hot and spicy and of plentiful portion, cooked directly in front of you on table-top burners. Careful though, because this stuff will get you spice-stoned.

Estelle Bar & Kitchen (243 High St, Northcote) – “A modest local eatery” as per the front page of its website, and there’s something rather classy about the whole scene here at Estelle. There’s a courtyard and quaint dining room, multiple prix fixe options on the menu, and individual selections that don’t outnumber the guests. If somehow, within the madness of MICE and WBC, you’ve managed to meet someone nice and plan to take him or her on a date, this place looks pretty much perfect.

Builders Arms (211 Gertrude St, Fitzroy) – Housed in an 150 year old pub, Builders Arms is absolutely one of the most intriguing entries on this list. The bar and bistro area offers a contemporary update on the classic public house it once was, with fine beers and wines on tap but also standards like Coopers and Carlton. There’s a beer garden, and an awesome wine list, and a separate dining room called Moon Under Water, offering a nightly 4 course menu for $75. This spot intrigues because, to a visitor’s eye, there’s something about it that seems to encompass modern Melbourne while nodding to its past. Fun and not too fussy, but by no means dingy, it’s the kind of bar every cool neighborhood should have.

Stokehouse (30 Jacka Blvd, St Kilda) – You could spend a week in Melbourne and forget it’s a seaside town, or you could journey out to St. Kilda and really get a sense of where you are: a thriving coastal metropolis on the bottom of the world. Stokehouse has fine dining upstairs, a less formal cafe downstairs, and delicious food in both. Seafood, of course – Melbs is mad for seafood – as well as awesome sounding steaks and desserts. And you’ll be right on the beach...near the penguins!

Loop back ’round to our Melbourne info portal, why don’t you? Good on ya!

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You’re in Melbourne, mate! Modern and lively, sprawling and vast, this city of more than 4 million people boasts no shortage of delicious things to eat and drink, plus fun things to see and do. If you’re reading this, you’re probably here for the World Barista Championship, held in conjunction with the 2013 Melbourne International Coffee Expo. Visit our Melbourne Sprudge Guides hub for a king’s ransom of recommended food and drink, compiled from a series of informal polls we sent out to friends with an intimate knowledge of the Melbourne urban landscape. This particular feature is meant to orient you towards what you can expect out on the town in Melbs.

Getting Around:

The post Where Am I? What Am I Doing? What Shouldn’t I Miss In Melbourne? appeared first on Sprudge.com.

We’re in Melbourne for the 2013 World Barista Championship, our first visit to this splendid city. How do you write a guide for a city if you’ve never been? Easy. We polled a dozen Melbourne residents and frequent visitors with excellent taste on their very favorite places to eat, drink, and have a coffee in the city. Read more features like this one in our Melbourne Sprudge Guides hub!

Breakfast, colloquially shortened to “breaky” or “brekkie” across Oz, is a matter of great cultural importance in Melbourne. You thought Portland and New York City were cool brunch towns? Melbs is utterly besotted with and captivated by breakfast foods, and you’ll see residents of this fair city getting down on brunch from Ascot Vale to Fitzroy, and everywhere in-between.

What’s the difference between a brunch place and a breakfast place? We haven’t the foggiest, because even Melbournians will tell you that the line between a good breaky and a proper brunch is blurry at best. (Brunch probably involves booze, and starts later, but we digress…) Some of Melbourne’s best restaurants and cafes are breakfast food joints first and foremost, blurring the cultural divisions even further, but one thing is crystal clear: breaky is Melbourne’s favorite meal of the day, and it’ll be yours too while you’re here.

Locals, did we leave out your favorite spot? It might be over in our Melbourne coffee guide…sorry mate, but again, the lines are blurry! Feel free to pass along more recommendations via @Sprudge on Twitter.

Duchess of Spotswood (87 Hudsons Rd, Spotswood) – The top answer for nearly all of our responders, home to what one breaky-minded American has unabashedly called “the greatest breakfast of my life, and one of my three favorite meals ever.” Dang, bro. The Duchess is located a little ways outside of the city, but by all accounts worth the trek. The menu is traditional English, with lots of smoked fish and pork, and you’ll probably see lots of coffee people here throughout the week of MICE.

Pillar of Salt (541 Church St, Richmond) – Kissing cousins to Top Paddock, and located just down the block on Church Street in Richmond, the sublime little Pillar of Salt came first and is enormously well-regarded for their breakfast options. Richmond is full of attractive, charming young Melbournians, so that may be reason enough to go, but a delicious looking food menu and 5 Senses coffee certainly sweetens the pot. Pop in and pretend like you live just ’round the way.

The Premises (202 Bellair St, Kensington) – House blend espresso from Seven Seeds, regularly rotating filter coffees from Proud Mary and Market Lane, and a worldly influence on the menu, with items like their “Kensington Eggs” – two poached eggs, goat cheese tzatiki, and eggplant puree – or a classic pulled pork BBQ sandwich with pickled watermelon.

Bluebird Espresso (134 Johnston St, Collingwood) – Three different kinds of baked eggs, multiple takes on muesli, and a B vitamin supplement placed right at the top of their menu. Bluebird also has a full range of lunch sandwiches, all available for a very reasonable $12.5, with tasty sounding stuff like a lamb burger, classic BLT, or smoked Tasmanian salmon with capers and dill.

De Clieu (187 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy) – There’s no official website for De Clieu, and that may be part and parcel with what Broadsheet Melbourne describes as the cafe’s “elegant simplicity” and sense of space. De Clieu is tiny and cute, and their menu is a locavore’s paradise of stuff like pork neck, avocado quinoa toast, and corn fritters, which keep popping up on menus we look at across the city. De Clieu serves coffee from Seven Seeds, and is one of the few places in Melbourne you’re likely to find a French press.

Monk Bodhi Dharma (202 Carlisle St, Balaclava) – As a roastery, breaky joint, and dinner location, there seems to be a great deal of multi-tasking going on at Monk Bodhi Dharma, but by all accounts they pull it off – this spot came recommended by several of our poll respondents. But we’re including Monk Bodhi because of the care and consideration they take for folks with dietary restrictions on their menu; all of their breaky offerings are vegetarian, with gluten free and vegan options to boot. Melbourne is very progressive when it comes to accommodating dietary restrictions, but this cafe goes a step further than most.

Hammer & Tong 412 (412 Brunswick St, Fitzroy) – Fitzroy is cooler than cool, and Hammer & Tong fits right in. Their brunch menu is playful and eclectic – see the “fried chicken wings w mango, grapefruit, candied chilies, crisp shallots, avocado & lime” – and they’re open clear through til dinner. The interior here personifies the whole Melbourne industrial modern thing quite nicely, and it’s a great place to sample coffee from Dukes, a roaster located in the nearby suburb of Windsor.

Two Birds, One Stone (12 Claremont St, South Yarra) – Another top gear 5 Senses breaky zone, with a lazer-focused coffee menu that offers just three options: “milk, black, or filter.” Lunch is served all day here, so if you need a steak sandwich with beetroot chutney, bacon, and horseradish at 9am, they won’t judge. Their menu changes all the time, but a sample list posted online included fancy ham hock baked beans with goat curds and rocket on toast, which sounds just cursedly sublime, right?

Twenty & Six Espresso (03051/594 Queensberry St, North Melbourne) – They’re serving up Proud Mary coffee here at this North Melbs breakfast spot, lauded by Broadsheet for having “some of Melbourne’s most creative and impeccably presented breakfasts.” This would be like getting called New York’s best cocktail bar, or Portland’s best outdoor patio, or Wisconsin’s best Bloody Mary – it’s a high compliment. There are apparently lines on the weekend, which is what happens when you’re doing something right. We’ll be stopping in.

Cheerio (323 Lennox St, Richmond) – This cafe is a high-flying collaborating between two well-known Melbourne coffee types, Charlotte Devereux and Chris Handley, who’ve got experience at Seven Seeds and Wall Two 80 shared betwixt them. The breaky menu here is relatively small, but people freak out about the porridge, and the interior design looks really gorgeous. Plus it’s in Richmond, which we’re pretty sure is where we’d want to live if we ever lived here…which is starting to sound like a better and better idea…

Loop back ’round to our Melbourne info portal, why don’t you? Good on ya!

The post 10 Places To Eat Breaky In Melbourne: Sprudge Guides appeared first on Sprudge.com.

We’re in Melbourne for the 2013 World Barista Championship, our first visit to this splendid city. How do you write a guide for a city if you’ve never been? Easy. We polled a dozen Melbourne residents and frequent visitors with excellent taste on their very favorite places to eat, drink, and have a coffee around town. Read more features like this one in our Melbourne Sprudge Guides hub!

From the dozen or so experts we polled, here’s our 10 recommendations for having a nice coffee time in Melbourne. It was an enormously difficult list to determine, and we remain impressed by the diversity in answers offered by our poll responders. There’s a chance your favorite cafe has been left out, but be sure to check over at our Melbourne Breaky Guide, because perhaps we’ve listed it there – the line between a cafe and a breakfast spot in Melbourne is all but non-existent, and visitors should consult these two lists in concert.

Still think we blew it by leaving your favorite out? Read us the riot act on Twitter (@Sprudge) and show us more cool stuff.

Proud Mary - This cafe in Collingwood appeared on literally every set of polling answers we received. One responder said, “If they could fit more coffee equipment on the bar, they’d do it. A mammoth 6 group Synesso and siphon bar bracket in a bunch of mad coffee enthusiasts. The awesome crew at Prouds look after everyone who comes through the door.” Others called it “hectic” but a must visit nonetheless, and several touted the food. Oh, and they’re one of the few cafes in Melbourne to offer public wifi. Go here! (172 Oxford St, Collingwood)

Patricia Coffee Brewers - Another cafe mentioned by nearly all of our respondents, Patrcia is the closest thing to a true “espresso bar” you’re likely to find in breaky-mad Melbs. The cafe is a standing room only affair, with a simple menu of “black, white, or filter” options. Very highly regarded by our poll folks. (493-495 Little Bourke Street)

Market Lane - Internationally renowned and likely already on your list, Market Lane’s brand is closely associated with the thriving coffee scene in Melbourne. This roaster-retailer has three locations around the city to enjoy espressos and filtered coffees, plus pick up a bag of beans for your friends back home. (109-111 Therry Street, 176 Faraday St. Carlton, Shop 13 Prahran Market - 163 Commercial Road)

Code Black Coffee Roasters - A newcomer on the Melbourne scene, with one of the more astonishing build outs (or “fit outs”) you’re likely to find in Melbourne, or anywhere else in the world for that matter. Code Black was home to the 2013 Victoria Barista Championship, which happened the very same day they opened their doors. Code Black will be home to our upcoming international cupping with Cafe Imports, happening Tuesday, May 22nd. (15-17 Weston Street Brunswick)

Seven Seeds - Another brand closely associated with Melbs, Seven Seeds’ flagship warehouse coffee bar / roastery was recommended by nearly every responder we polled. They’ve got La Marzocco Stradas and a variety of filter coffee methods, plus a revered kitchen serving food until 3pm daily. Seven Seeds is an important part of the ongoing narrative of specialty coffee in Melbourne, and a must-visit on your trip. Go here! (106 – 114 Berkeley St Carlton)

St. Ali / Sensory Lab – Peas in a pod, these two brands share the same familial lineage and ownership, and together they’ve dominated the Australian competitive coffee scene in 2013, boasting a staff that includes both current Brewers Cup and Barista Championship winners. St. ALi is a coffee and brunch palace with two locations; Sensory Lab sits in the foyer of a department store in the CBD, and serves roaringly good espresso alongside multiple Hario filter options. They don’t make cafes like this in North America, which seems increasingly foolish the more time we spend down here… (St. ALi North: 815 Nicholson St, Carlton; St. ALi South: 12-18 Yarra Pl, South Melbourne; Sensory Lab: 297 Little Collins St)

Everyday Coffee - Multiroasters are still a bit of a rarity in Melbs, but Everyday Coffee fills the gap by offering a revolving menu of coffee options, comprised of around 5 filter coffee choices and multiple espressos. Owner Mark Free is well-versed in global coffee trends and who’s-who in the roasting world, and his cafe reflects that – they’re one of the only cafes in all of Australia serving batch brew! We’re teaming up with Everyday for a cupping party following the madness of MICE, featuring coffees from all around – we’re calling it the WBC Come Down, and you can learn more by clicking this link. Also, as an aside, people freak out about the key lime pie at Everyday Coffee (multiple responders mentioned it). Did you think you’d be flying to Melbourne and eating key lime pie? We sure didn’t, but you know what? Screw it, two slices please. (33 Johnston St)

Brother Baba Budan - This is the sister cafe to Seven Seeds, and is highly regarded by Melbourne locals and visitors alike for capturing the city’s charming modern allure. Tucked down an alley (or “laneway) on Little Bourke Street, this is in many ways the quintessential urban Melbs coffee bar, with espressos & filter coffees done right. Towards the top of our must-visit list, and it should be on yours, too. (359 Little Bourke St)

Top Paddock – Just 6 months old, Top Paddock is Melbourne’s symphonic love affair with coffee & brunch, presented in a single passionate aria. There is a lovely take away counter up front, but the real action here is at one of Top Paddock’s 150+ seats, clustered tastefully in nooks and crannies across a tastefully outfitted custom built space. The food here is divine but the coffee steals the show, with SOE and blended espresso choices alongside filter coffees, all roasted by 5 Senses. Our coffees were presented with tasteful info sheets; brunch goers are handed a coffee menu in perfect harmony with the food offerings, and all the printed materials are gorgeous. We ordered everything on the coffee menu and were uniformly impressed. If Melbourne is the greatest fancy coffee brunch city in the world (and signs point to yes), then Top Paddock is among its crown jewels. (658 Church St, Richmond)

Auction Rooms - For our last selection, a preponderance of those polled mentioned Auction Rooms, the cafe outlet for the folks at Small Batch Roasters. Like most shops in Melbs, Auction Rooms has a dual focus on expertly prepared coffee and delicious food. But unlike most shops in Melbs, they’ve got hours until 10pm on weekends, and an extremely high volume siphon program. Melbourne’s industrial chic design has a comfortable home here. We’ve been instructed to try the fruit salad. (103-107 Errol St, North Melbourne)

Loop back ’round to our Melbourne info portal, why don’t you? Good on ya!

The post 10 Places To Drink Coffee In Melbourne: Sprudge Guides appeared first on Sprudge.com.

Welcome to Sprudge.com’s exclusive, sprawling guide to the cafes, restaurants, bars and pubs of Melbourne. We’re in town for the 2013 Melbourne International Coffee Expo and World Barista Championship, and the following pages are meant to be partners in crime for the international legion of Sprudge readers set to descend on Melbourne in the coming week.

In order to construct this guide, we turned to a roster of friends and acquaintances with a wide range of experience in the Melbourne coffee scene. We polled around a dozen people; some are Melbourne natives, others are ex-pats living and working in Melbs or frequent visitors, but they’re all huge coffee enthusiasts, which means they’ve got great taste in all the other stuff that counts. Trust us, that’s how it works.

It’s our pleasure to pass along the following Sprudge Guides to Melbourne:

10 Places To Drink Coffee In Melbourne

10 Places To Eat Breaky In Melbourne

10 Places For A Nice Dinner In Melbourne

10 Places To Drink Fancy In Melbourne

10 Cheap Spots To Eat & Drink In Melbourne

Where Am I? What Am I Doing? What Shouldn’t I Miss In Melbourne?

These guides are not The Last Word on what’s good in Melbourne, not by a long shot. If your favorites are left out, or you think we’ve done a knob’s job of collecting info, you can always let us know via Twitter – feel free to point out more great stuff we shouldn’t miss But we think we’ve spun together an pretty darn fun operational series of field guides to help you – and us – get the most out of our time in Melbourne. We’ll also recommend you towards Broadsheet Melbourne, which really is the city’s Last Word on what’s good, and whose archives are a really fun way to explore and learn about Melbourne as a visitor.

Last, we’d like to thank our team of poll responders, including Tim Varney, M’Lissa Muckerman, Ben Bicknell, Anya Sereda, Eileen Kenny, and several more folks who responded anonymously. Thank you all! Now let’s go have fun in Melbourne.

The post Melbourne Sprudge Guides Hub – Drinks, Food, Advice, Coffee, Penguins & More appeared first on Sprudge.com.

Milstead & Co.

Part and parcel with The Lewontin Theory of Seattle small business economics, Andrew Milstead’s pantheon to specialty coffee underwent a literally unfathomable duress of delays, red tape, and bureaucratic King County bullshit prior to finally opening in time for Seattle Coffee Fest 2011. Both arms of Sprudge visited well after the C-Fest hubbub had died down, and left with a handful of impressions on Milstead & Co., the most ambitious new cafe to open in Seattle in a long, long time. We wound up so impressed, we awarded Milstead & Co. a coveted Sprudgie Award for Best New Cafe.

First things first, all of the coffees we’ve had at Milstead & Co. has been solid, bordering on delicious, or downright delightful. Coffees tasted included several Guatemalans from Stumptown served as espresso, various Aeropresses from Coava, and a rare off-menu chance to try Kenyan coffee from Market Lane, in Melbourne. Shots of single origin espresso have thus far been complex, unique and exemplary – for a cafe that lives and dies by its SOE offerings, Milstead has the alchemy down.

Milstead & Co are doing a laudable job of handling their multi-roaster identity. You’ll see a Stumptown sprinter van parked outside, and notice the cluster of Starbucks Roy Street apparatchiks gaggling around the front bar. Milstead is currently offering (or at least displaying) an array of coffees from Stumptown, Heart, Coava, and Intelligentsia. One gets the feeling that a great many very special coffees make their egress and ingress through the front doors of Milstead & Co. on a weekly basis, a fact that should not be overlooked by those unfamiliar with the reality of Seattle coffee, which is as curiously cloistered as it is tres moderne.

All that to say, it should be noted that the cafe itself is just enormous. You could stage a bullfight inside of Milstead & Co., or open a full cast production of “H.M.S. Pinafore”, or build your very own Boeing 747. It is an agoraphobe’s nightmare. Huge! Everything has this kind of ash-beige blonde wooden veneer, with an impossibly large cluster of high tables, high chairs, and metallic gleaming high bar seats clustered around a high front window. That high front window is the sweet spot, by the way, as it reduces the voluminous sweep of the place to a charming view of the lake, the bridge, and the assorted doings and goings of Fremont.

This is quite possibly the biggest non-roaster cafe we’ve ever seen – should at some point in the future Mr. Milstead seek to try his hand at roasting, he’ll have ample room in his current digs. It’s a testament to interior design, then, that Milstead & Co. doesn’t feel forbidding or cold. There’s a truly epic assortment of vintage treasures arranged behind the front bar. The cache of gear for sale towards the South window of the shop is as good as any we’ve seen. Andrew Milstead’s attention to detail is evident in a recent months-long collaboration with LA-based artist Chris Turnham, whose coffee plant art adorns the walls, with limited edition prints available for sale. A gorgeous shared outdoor seating area just longs for those clean, late Seattle summer nights. There is so much promise here.

Go and visit Milstead & Co. as soon as you possibly can. Let Andrew himself recommend you a coffee flight; order multiple things, and put your trust in him. For the wide array of coffee he offers, there is a careful sense of curatorial playfulness afoot here to rival any multi-roaster in America.

Analog Coffee

On the exact opposite end of the spacial spectrum from Milstead & Co., there is Analog Coffee, a quaint little space on Summit in the Capitol Hill neighborhood. Like a magic eye puzzle, the interior of Analog reveals itself as your eyes adjust to the fuzzy warmth of the space. The vibe here is provisionally Nordic: a single low wood table by the front left window, buttressed by curved bench seating; high chairs at a sparse counter in the front right; a simple wooden hanging menu; huge metallic heating and fan implements potted plants dominating their rightful place in cafe’s canopy, and a softly angled front counter framing a wide entryway. That open front space is keenly reminiscent of Cafe Peddar in Carrol Gardens, Brooklyn, but with a much softer attitude and color palate. Opaque, muted eggshell tones abound, nowhere with more understated grace than on Analog’s White-Out white Synesso Hydra, outfitted with digital timer displays on each grouphead.

Analog serves Herkimer Coffee, a Seattle roaster almost entirely unknown outside the Northwest. (In discussing this feature, Sprudge mentioned Herkimer to a [very] prominent figure in American specialty coffee; he had never heard of them.) Herkimer is not perfect – the “About” copy on their website, for starters – but we’ve had interesting, chimerical experiences with their coffee in the past. It can be surprisingly delicious from time to time, and knowledgeable Seattleites have been known extoll Herkimer’s virtues. You can taste it at Analog. The shots we tried were fine, but the cups of V60 brewed coffee – Herkimer’s Tanzania Ruvumana, in particular – were unexpectedly piquant.

Open 5 months and still entirely owner-operated, it’s the little details as much as the coffee that make Analog stand out. Vintage speakers at a dedicated vinyl nook behind the counter, an antique Sony reel to reel TC-366 in the restroom, a thin rail of a standing counter space running along the south wall, piles of comic books on the aforementioned ash-blonde front table…the overall effect is, in a word, charming, and a worthy new addition to the Seattle cafe scene.

Canlis

Our full write-up of the coffee service at Canlis is available here.

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Two excellent Philadelphia coffee guides already exist, from Oliver Strand / The New York Times and Liz Clayton / Serious Eats. Both were published earlier this year, and both cover several of the same shops that appear in our own guide. In some ways this overlap is inevitable; Philadelphia lacks the sheer volume of amazing coffee shops found in, say, New York or Portland, to say nothing of Seattle (where there is coffee everywhere, though only a thin percentage of it is amazing). But what Philly lacks in quantity it more than makes up for in quality – there are high-flying design shops, charming neighborhood shops, gorgeous empire showcases, and feisty newcomers edging for a piece of the action. New spaces are seemingly popping up all the time. The growth of specialty coffee culture in Philly shows absolutely no sign of slowing.

Best of all, the Philadelphia coffee scene has that x-factor new nucleus energy particle feel to it, an ineffable excitement that happens when your city’s high-end coffee culture is still new and shiny, everyone knows each other, and the caliber of work being done is of the highest quality. We’ve written rhapsodically about Philadelphia’s monthly Thursday Night Throwdown – likely the greatest coffee party of its kind in the world – but you don’t have to be there for an event to feel that spark. Go to Philly, visit some shops, tell them you’re from out of town and ask for recommendations. See if you don’t feel it too.

As always with our guides, what follows is a snapshot of the Philadelphia cafe scene – nothing authoritative, just another notch on the bedpost of love that Philly coffee has amassed. There are great coffee shops here, serving coffee from world-beating roasters, crafted by the talented, hilarious barista social network of friends, lovers and acquaintances who make Philly coffee a world-class reality. If their hospitality and charm shines through in the following 1000 words or so, then we’ll have done our job.

Welcome to Philly! Let’s go drink some coffee!

Bodhi (410 S. 2nd Street, Queen’s Village)

Open for just about 1 year, Bodhi, in the cobblestone and carriage house bedecked Queen’s Village neighborhood, is one of the cutest, most carefully appointed coffee shops Sprudge has ever had the pleasure to visit. Some of that is the gracious gorgeousness of the setting; Bodhi sits on Headhouse Square, a quaint block of red brick sidewalks, intercut with ancient storm cellar doors that jut out of the walkways like gaping lion’s mouths. There’s also a charm to the space itself, with its interior walls painted in shades of muted egg shell, the whole thing modest, small and just so: a handmade wooden bar built by Bodhi’s owners, another handmade metal and wood pour over bar, yet another handmade wooden display wrack, featuring a small selection of sundries from Green Isles Grocers, including local honey, maple syrup, chocolate, crackers, pickles, marmalades, and the stuff that dreams are made of.

Even better is the coffee. Bodhi is a Stumptown account, one of three such accounts appearing in this roundup, and they’re doing especially top-notch work with Hairbender Espresso. During our visit, four coffees were available via pour-over or by the bag: Guatemala Vella Vista, Burundi Bwayi, Rwanda Kenzu, and Costa Rica Montes de Oro. Befitting the tight confines of the space, Bodhi runs with a small, dedicated staff, and the Barista during our visit, Grey, was professional, courteous, and gifted behind the bar. That in-house chicken salad sandwich on brioche is a must.

Town Hall Coffee (358 Montgomery Avenue, Merion Station)

Located just outside of Philadelphia city limits, in the heart of the Main Line, Town Hall has been open just more than a year, during which time owner Tim Noble has put together top-notch multiroaster program on par with the likes of Barista in Portland or RBC in Manhattan. On our visit, the featured espressos came from Counter Culture, while the pour over list included the El Salvador Altamira from Gimme! and some Sulawesi Toarco auction lot roasted by OQ Coffee, out of New Brunswick.

The coffees served at Town Hall change often, but in permanent rotation is a bevy of gadgetry sure to impress the gear nerd behind every coffee geek. Compak K-10 autogrinders, 4-rack pour over bar from Visions, and coolest of all, a gorgeous, low-slung Cleveland Browns brown La Marzocco GS2, a 1973 restore originally owned by Fonte in Seattle. Rebuilt by the folks at Gimme!, this GS2 features variable line pressure, manual pre-infusion, and that certain swagger you can only get with machines built in the Brezhnev era. It pulls a damn fine shot of espresso, too – a shot of Counter Culture Rustico from that machine tasted of cloved crema spice, with honey on the back end.

Town Hall’s interior space has a very open flow, unobstructed from front to back with seats clustered around the bar, and a few leather chairs and tables to the side of the entry way. Rotating menus, when they’re done right, can be an awful lot of fun, and they’re doing it right at Town Hall, a Philadelphia coffee destination set a bit off the beaten path. It’s well worth the trip.

Ultimo Coffee (1900 S. 15th Street)

A Counter Culture Coffee account in the Newbold neighborhood of South Philly, Ultimo has been open for just under 2 years, during which time they’ve established themselves as one of the premiere destinations for coffee not just in Philadelphia, but throughout the entire East Coast. Their beautiful, distinctive glass panel menu, with smoked white lettering on the window panes, gives way to an ever-changing assortment of coffees from CCC, offered via Chemex til 11am or all day long on a custom brew bar. The lovely Ultimo Griffin insignia abounds inside this shop – on bags, to-go cups, t-shirts, hot cup cozies, and in the very hearts of Ultimo’s loyal clientele.

Philly does the locavore thing in this intrinsic, almost tribal kind of way – there’s regional pride, and then there’s Philadelphia pride. Ultimo does a fantastic job of representing the astounding bounty of agricultural and dairy products coming out of Lancaster County, PA; they use milk from the Amish-owned Maplehofe Dairy, source their honey and butter from Green Meadow Farms, and offer a goat cheese spread from local ungulate purveyors Apple Tree Farms. When we visited, shots were pulled on a Marzocco GB5 3-group with custom lighting, but these days Ultimo is home to a Strada EP, one of the few places in the world that can make such a claim.

We could go on and on, but if his mid-2000s murky coffee / Spruce Street Espresso pedigree isn’t enough, you can trust us on this one: Ultimo is a must-visit on any Philadelphia coffee tour.

Shot Tower Coffee (542 Christian Street)

Another must-visit on your Philly coffee tour, Shot Tower is a top-end Stumptown account in the Queen’s Village neighborhood of South Philly, pulling shots expertly on a Strada MP via Rober-E grinders and offering Bee House pour over service.  Enormously bright, huge open glass windows look out on a pleasantly sleepy street scene, while inside the cafe is carefully appointed with charming details: streetlamp interior lighting, an industrial-college-cafeteria-chic milk dispenser, orchids and ferns on the front bar, light wood floors, a worker’s communal lunch table with swivel stools salvaged from the Tasty Kake factory, and an electro-swinging Japanese maneki cat in the bathroom.

You’ll find great coffee here, but even if you just get a shot, find an excuse to linger. An ebb tide of Queen’s Village quirk washes in and out of Shot Tower throughout the day, co-mingling a rogue’s gallery of newly moved-in bicycle enthusiast types, fresh-faced college students, and pleasant old Italian dudes who have never actually set foot out of South Philly a day in their lives, and have no intention of doing so.

Shot Tower is forward thinking by anyone’s standards, with daily employee and public cuppings and an ambitious guest espresso program (recent visits saw coffees from Coava and Sight Glass on the bar, and El Reposo from Barismo is slated next). You could live in any neighborhood in America – including the East Village, the Mission District,  or anywhere in Portland – and still consider yourself lucky to have Shot Tower within walking distance.

La Colombe (1414 South Penn Square)

This entry is for the newer of La Colombe’s two cafes in Philadelphia, their Center City space, just off Penn Square in the first floor of a highrise office tower. It’s hyperbolically stunning -  sparsely appointed, this place is all about the angles, the key feature being floor-to-ceiling windows that look out from a crooked vantage point at Philadelphia’s City Hall, the world’s tallest freestanding masonry building. Sun and shadows bounce off the ancient stone of City Hall as morning turns to afternoon, and the whole cafe sort of…tilts…towards the magnificence of this remarkable structure. Just gorgeous.

The space itself employs an enormous amount of wood, aluminum exposed piping (a must for every Philly cafe space, and seemingly every Philly bar), all placed so as to show off La Colombe’s working 1957 Faema lever machine. Along a luxuriously curved  bar, a multi-spiget spout system offers filtered cold, filtered room temperature, and sparkling waters on tap.

The espresso and macchiatos of Colombe’s Haitian coffee were drinkable, but almost like disappearing ink on the palate. Delicious milk texture in the macchiato, but again, this coffee was like drinking a magic trick, more Houidini than Haiti. The “Corsica” drip we tried tasted like, well, the bottom of a brewing urn. Think that last cup of Mr. Coffee left to wilder past 3pm in the office break room of your nightmares. The iced coffee at La Colombe is made from drip coffee, ice cubes, and a shot of espresso on top. This may very well have cut it in the go-go-go dot-com red-eye buzz stop Seattle of the mid-90s, but these days, it is a travesty to the good name of iced coffee, a step backwards masquerading as a preservation act. There are guides for this – La Colombe, your iced coffee could be much, much better.

Ultimately, we were simply dumbstruck by the space itself. It’s gorgeous, really impressive, and the baristas were all super nice, and they’re clearly doing brisk business, and they’re super successful nationally, with a loyal die-hard clientele, hard-earned and well-retained. Not our favorite cup of coffee, but spend an hour in that space, sitting on the bar, watching the shadows creep across City Hall…

OCF Cafe (1745 South Street, Rittenhouse Square)

Another choice CCC account, serving Toscano, multiple coffees on french press, and a pour-over “quick cup” service til 10AM. Neon green walls, a black bar-length chalbkoard across a lengthy service bar, low ceilings, exposed Edison light fixtures and a wooden back bar, all of it minimalist and unassuming. Open just a few months, OCF recently played host to its first TNT, an event that saw the space packed to bursting with people, pizza, and plastic cups of pale ale. A welcome new addition to the Center City cafe landscape.

SIDEBAR: A brief note on coffee slang in Philly
"Hobo Latte" - 2 shots of espresso over ice, with milk.
"All City Special" - a shot of whiskey with a beer (usually Kenzinger, 
Philly's beloved swill beer of choice). Not specifically a coffee term, 
but if you hang out with Philly coffee people for long enough 
it's bound to come up.
"C-Squared" - coffee shop customer crushes.

One Shot (217 W George Street, Northern Liberties)

Repeated visits, hours spent lingering, and we’re still not sure what to make of this place. It’s easily the nicest cafe in North Philly – will someone please open a dope shop in Fishtown, please? – but it struggles from the juggled identity problem that befalls so many cafe / brunch spot / full menu / coffee bar hybrids. “Captain Crunch French Toast with Marshmallow Fluff”? Sure, why not? “Vanilla Cherry Lattes” and “Honey Almond Breve Delights”? Not so much.

Curious, then, that One Shot is home to its very own proprietary Stumptown coffee, the “One Shot House Blend”, which has been served here since the cafe made the switch to Stumptown a few years ago. It seems like ancient history now, but once upon a time One Shot was the first cafe serving Stumptown in Philadelphia. Since a great many coffee nerds have probably never heard of the One Shot Blend, here’s the notes from the little Alecco insert card on the bag:

“Stumptown created a blend for One Shot. This blend was designed to serve as an excellent cup of coffee at any time of the day, but also doubles as a well-balanced espresso. It consists of coffees from Latin America and East Africa.

One Shot House Blend displays a foral aroma with flavor notes of ripe fruit and underlying sweeteners.

Location: Latin America & East Africa

Elevation: Varying

We love to go on (and on and on) about cafe interior design, and the space at One Shot holds the distinction of warranting the most Little Black Notebook pages in Sprudge.com history. Designed by Chris Sheffield of SLDesign, One Shot sets a new bar for American contemporary cafe design – just a thousand little details, almost too much to write about, but here goes. A plethora of succulents and flowers from Beautiful Blooms greets the customer on the medium-high front bar, set apart from a charming flannel gray banquette that curves along the window seating, giving way to a choice upstairs seating area that boasts leather couches, formica counter top tables, an almost impossibly vast library wall with titles from Danielle Steele to “A Guide To Psychotherapy”, yarn lamps, tea cozies, and most astonishing of all, a friggin’ Honda motorcycle set on its jackstand in the middle of the seating area. An incredible sound system pipes Casey Casum Top 40 best-ofs from yesteryear, locals lounge with dogs outside, and another order of Marshmallow Fluff Toast comes up from the unobtrusive back kitchen. There’s a TON of printing, shirts, zines, branding from local artists and zines from as far away as Portland for sale at the front counter. There’s about 30 other things we aren’t mentioning…just an immaculate interior design job at this space, the very best that money can buy, a showplace pantheon to that newest new school in the cafe design style lexicon, which we’re dubbing “Post-Baroque Port-lyn Gaudy”.

It’s not the best shot of espresso you’re going to have in Philadelphia, but it’s sure not the worst. When you go out for beer in Northern Liberties – and you really should go out for beer in Northern Liberties – stop here, gawk at the space, count yourself among the rare outsiders to try the One Shot Blend, and uh, get some Captain Crunch french toast if you want.

Spruce Street Espresso (1101 Spruce Street)

It’s almost impossible for us to write objectively about Spruce Street – let’s just get that out up front. The coffee community that Faith and Betty Ortiz have built around this cafe space is near and dear to us, and we count ourselves as a part of it. Some of our very favorite people – coffee or otherwise – run the bar at this small, homey space just south of Center City. So here, instead, is a slice of life from inside Spruce Street, captured on a day like any other in mid-2011:

I basically look as inhospitable as possible, slouched over both a laptop and a notebook, chewing on a pen, but my coffee is really, really good – a PNG Baroida from Counter Culture made via V-60, backed with a shot of Apollo, coaxing my neurons into a rapid-fire staccato thwack-thwack-thwack on the keyboard in front of me. This space is tiny, but it feels like you own it when you’re seated inside, and the outdoor seating stretches out for nearly a half block on the side wall, with more tables around the corner. And then this tiny space does something to me that rarely ever happens.

I start a conversation with a stranger.

“What’s that he’s got there?”, I ask the mother sitting on the other side of the room. (Given Spruce Street’s Lilliputian dimensions, this places her roughly 3 yards away from me.) Her son, small and blonde, is nursing something that looks like a macchiato, very much playing the grown-up out on a coffee date. “Oh it’s a baby-ccino”, she tells me with a lovely Australian accent. A baby-ccino, she goes on to explain, is a common Australian custom of serving steamed milk and foam in a demitasse with powdered chocolate on top. It gives kids in Australia something to do while mum and dad are out for their 8th espresso of the day, while training them in advance to be discerning coffee drinkers when they grow up. It is the ne plus ultra of “nurture” over “nature” in the coffee drinker’s evolutionary durée. Also, it’s adorable – “I’ll have a baby-ccino for my baby, please”. They’re on the menu here at Spruce Street. How droll.

So there we are, talking, random strangers, talking about baby-ccinos in a coffee shop, and it kind of hits me – this is why Spruce Street is a big deal. This is why you’ve heard of it before – for all of its competition history, its high profile at national events, and the top caliber of coffee they serve, it is Spruce Street’s intimate, profoundly neighborhood vibe that makes it one of a kind, the sort of cafe that can’t help but foster community and, dare I say it, bring even the chilliest-in-public Northwesterner out of his shell. “Espresso in Australia is a very big deal”, she tells me, “but I’m so lucky to live in Philadelphia, and have places like this to go everyday”. You don’t know how right you are.

Elixr (207 S. 15th Street)

Another choice Center City cafe, this time serving up the goods from PT’s Coffee. It’s always exciting for us to get a chance to try that coffee in a cafe setting, as it doesn’t exist on the West Coast and is sorely underrepresnted in New York. Elixr does solid, proficient work with it, and the space is a woodsman’s wonderland, everything in that bright blonde Nordic wood style with subtle undertones of chrome. Pretty well covered by other media outlets, by virtue of the fact that it is co-owned by a 300+ pound lineman for the Philadelphia Eagles. The Philly TNT they hosted a few months back was a real highlight; relive our coverage of that night here.

A closing note:

We didn’t get a chance to visit these cafes, but you totally should! Check out these shops when you’re in town:

Milkboy Coffee (2 East Lancaster Avenue): A Counter Culture account with two locations, one on the Main Line in Ardmore and a 2nd, brand new location in Center City, near Thomas Jefferson University.

Lovers and Madmen (28 S 40th Street): Another Counter Culture account, this time near Penn Univeristy. “The best coffee in West Philly”, by reputation.

Gryphon Cafe: In Wayne, PA, on the Main Line.

Chestnut Hill: The closest thing Philly has to a specialty roaster…for now.

View Sprudge.com Philadelphia Coffee Guide in a larger map

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“You guys are from Seattle? No wonder you write about coffee!”

We’ve heard it hundreds of times. Never from friends in the industry, baristas, cafe owners, roasters or journalists, mind you – they’ve long-since learned that specialty coffee has no home base these days, no anchor city to speak of, and that the best roasters, cafes and baristas in the world are as likely to be found in Sydney and Seoul as they are in Portland or the Bay Area. But family members, however – particularly those who (beginning in roughly 1994) learned to associate Seattle with Niles Crane’s four-part orders at Cafe Nervosa – well, they think it’s only fitting that we wound up writing this sort of website.

No city in America, and perhaps the world, is more closely associated with milk-and-coffee concoctions than Seattle. And for good reason. There’s coffee everywhere in Seattle, in every block of downtown, on every corner, in the hands of countless pedestrians, and in the tiny drive-through kiosks that dot the Puget Sound suburbs. Coffee in Seattle is built into the urban landscape in a way that at this point feels intrinsic, like the act of some all-knowing, all-brewing city planner. It occupies a weighty place in the Seattle cultural mindset, for which you can thank the aforementioned Frasier, or the coffee shop hangouts depicted in Singles, not to mention the sheer economic reality of having multiple enormous multi-national coffee purveyors, including that 10 ton green mermaid gorilla, headquartered within Seattle city limits.

There’s some really cutting edge, fascinating stuff going on in Seattle, especially when it comes to the machine builders, green buyers and roasters who’ve made this city their home. But the reality as we see it is, most of what’s here exists in a remarkable sort of time warp. The vast majority of coffee in Seattle feels like a nicotine-and-grunge fueled mosquito trapped in amber, where you, too, can journey to a prehistoric jungle and marvel at creatures from a bygone era.

For better or for worse, we offer our Sprudge Guide to Seattle as a panoramic kind of snapshot. Nothing authoritative, more experiential than anything else. Welcome to Seattle, let’s go drink some coffee.

Lighthouse Coffee Roasters

One gets a feeling, one really does. From the Formica tabletops to the barista who looks like the guy from the Spin Doctors, this place just feels like the mid-1990′s. Linoleum floors, a long front bar, and that roaster in the back, a vintage Gothot that dominates the space with its very presence. Lighthouse was Duane Sorenson’s first roasting gig, and while it’s not the exact same machine Duane learned to roast on, it’s in the same space, and you can almost imagine him there…the baristas up front would look much the same, and the menu offerings – unspecific mystery beans from an importer with labels like ”Estate Java”, non-descript Sumatra, Panama, Nicaragua, Ethiopian, Kenya AA, Yemen, and “dark roasts” including French and French Sumatra – feel flown in wholesale from oh, say, the release date of ”Nirvana Unplugged”.

Shots of espresso at Lighthouse taste like burnt toast and ashtrays…at first. But then, with that last little sip, the flavors go to this delightful cinnamon condensed milk place, still burnt, mind you, but with sugars peeking through the carbon. The barista tells us, “I don’t want to be making coffee for the rest of my life. It’s impossible to pull a perfect shot, but you can try forever. It’s hard, and fun” - and isn’t that almost exactly right? One gets a feeling this place was really swingin’ in the Nineties. And it was! Once upon a time, Fremont was the weirdest, coolest, most swingingest neighborhood in Seattle. But it’s not anymore; people cling to places like Lighthouse for that last gasp of neatness. It used to be a free lovin’ hippy pit, Lenin statue and all, but nowadays you’re more likely to encounter families with frames from Eyes on Fremont, stoppin’ off at Lighthouse for a cappuccino before getting the whole family a big sloppy cuban sandwich at Paseo. People go there now because they happen to live there, but once upon at time, this place was one hell of a clove smokin’ hang-out hookup spot. Is it the coolest shop in town these days? No. But you could do far worse with your Seattle afternoon than to stop by Lighthouse, admire the space, have a cappuccino, and get over to Paseo for lunch. The grilled corn on the cob? Are you kidding me?

Vivace

The Espresso Vivace coffee cart has been open in the heart of Capitol Hill’s Broadway thoroughfare since 1988. It’s quite literally an institution, with acolytes (the staff is famously loyal), mythologies (the goddess “Caffeina” awaits your spare change down a small side hallway), and a bonafide prophet at the helm. There’s no one in the Seattle coffee world more revered and accredited than David Schomer, a man who wears many hats (and bolo ties) as Vivace’s founder, muse, maestro and chief champion. Beneath a sign reading “A Sidewalk Espresso Bar – Since 1988″, Vivace’s simple menu contains information on ristretto shots, why they’re used at the shop, and absolutely no drip coffee. This isn’t likely to turn heads these days, but back in the late 80s, it was revolutionary, a plainly stated call to arms for the quality and care given to a very specific style of espresso. And these days, shots at Vivace are consistent – stop to stop, year to year on that Synesso machine - decidedly Italian in profile and yet, somehow, miraculously clean, complex and delicious. It’s no secret that coffee pilgrims to Seattle make damn sure to include Vivace on their itinerary. The trappings of la espressiano italiano belissimo are supposed to be anathema to the “third wave palate”, but our real and honest suggestion is to get over it already. Not every shot should taste like this, but sometimes it’s great when a shot tastes like this. Variety is the spice of life, and the cart – that lovely, dingy little wall-kiosk cart – has been there for eons in the Specialty Coffee Geologic Timescale. Even if you don’t like it, you’ll like it.

But honestly, the best thing about Vivace isn’t the coffee, it’s the view. The Vivace cart on Broadway inarguably offers the best view of any coffee shop in Seattle, and the last time we visited, we sat and made a little list of what we saw. From a randomly sampled 15 minute interlude: overheard conversation snippets, auditory delights, funny looks, repeated requests for change, classic Seattle chilly glances (this passes for flirting in the Seattleite id/ego/super ego), assorted comings and goings at the Casa Del Ray apartments, the endless gray-scale rush of Broadway drama, diatribe and detritus, fashion plates in kitten heels and grandma tights, couples holding hands, sprinkling rain, ear gauges that would make a Maori warrior blink, incongruous joggers, someone that you used to know, scarves, caps, hooded sweatshirts (no matter the month or time of day), endless leather booty boots, blue jeans, more blue jeans, the beautiful and the hideous and the mundane, the fabulous, the befuddled, and those far too busy to care.

We could sit there forever, and have.

Monorail Espresso

Seattle’s classic Downtown hole-in-the-wall, populated by anachronistic clove-smoking bike messengers and rushed office space apparatchiks. Located in the heart of the Seattle urban core, Monorail’s menu is home to a sea of chai and leprechaun lattes and snickerdoodles and peppermint mochas, made lovingly by an old man from Bulgaria. Think of it as the Honey Badger of Seattle coffee; they’ve been doing what they do since before time began, with a certain kind of Seattle urban je ne sais quo about it, and they don’t care what you think. You might not need a peppermint mocha, but you should begrudgingly respect the fact that places like this, these impossibly popular little swill-slinging joints, have fought long and hard for their own place in the coffee world. Places like Monorail offer a glimpse at the living history of coffee in Seattle. “Monorail Espresso don’t care; Monorail Espresso don’t give a shit.”

The Good Coffee Company

When the zombie apocalypse finally arrives, humanity’s few survivors will take comfort in performing ritual actions of The Before Times, the Long-Long Ago. Welcome to The Good Coffee Company, where the roast practices haven’t changed in 30 years, and the past is fused inexorably with the present. It’s a hidden cathedral of Seattle coffee history we highly recommend visiting.

The Good Coffee Company is not a cafe, per se, but they do have 150 (that’s right, one hundred and fifty) blends of espresso, all of them numbered individually and served “off menu”. This means, in theory, that customers have been coming to TGCC for decades and ordering a “#37″, or a “#75″, or a “#3 with fries and a Coke”.  The menu itself – hand written, yellowing on a piece of lined graph paper – hasn’t changed one bit since, say, the first Reagan inauguration. The father and son who own the place are quite friendly, rightly proud of their place in Seattle’s coffee history, and will gladly pull you a shot of espresso served in a full-sized paper cup (the kind with little handle wings). The whole experience has a certain kind of moth-balled charm about it, as though one has boarded a neglected, mundane, shabby-chic industrial time machine.

The early 1970s in Seattle were the petri dish in which specialty coffee culture in America first grew. Starbucks, Wet Whisker (which became Stewart Brothers, which became Seattle’s Best Coffee) and The Good Coffee Company were on the forefront of that bacterial gurgle. Starbucks became a mega-titan; Seattle’s Best expanded, was bought out by Starbucks, and is now served worldwide by Subway, Burger King, and Steak ‘n Shake (to name just a few). The Good Coffee Company, however, has not changed one iota in all that time; it’s still there, in a first-level space underneath the Highway 99 viaduct, roasting coffee in exactly the same way as it did 10, 20, 30, even 40 years ago. It’s the coffee roaster that time forgot, and yet, they soldier on. They have loyal clients, in fact, clients who speak volumes online about the quality of their service, and they’ll gladly pull you a shot if you happen to drop by. Charming, remarkable and undeniably Jurassic, The Good Coffee Company provides the kind of coffee experience you can only find in Seattle.

Starbucks Coffee Company

So, let’s talk about it. The “Original Starbucks” (historically the second Starbucks, when the original original space at 2000 Western Avenue closed in 1976) sits in the north end of Pike Place Market, playing host to endless throngs of weekend tourists and aging, unshakably devout locals. If for no other reason, the “original” Starbucks is worth your while for a rare chance to enjoy Starbucks coffee from a non-superautomatic machine. They are actually pulling your shots here! There’s a Marzocco 4 Group on the bar! They take your order, shout it over your head across to the barista station, and leave you to wonder at the antique world map to your left, lovingly adorned in mid-90s Starbucks passport stickers.

To speak the truth, there are some awfully nice Starbucks shops in Seattle. *The 15th Avenue stealth project has given up the ghost and now openly flies the Mermaid Flag,  while it’s still ”Roy Street Coffee & Tea” a little ways further down the hill; both are gorgeous moneyed playgrounds of interior cafe design, and worth seeing. The newly remodeled Starbucks on Olive and Denny (colloquially referred to as the ”Gaybucks” by generations of Capitol Hill residents) is similarly stunning, though not quite as sumptuous and ostentatious as the Roy Street and 15th Avenue locations. Think fake fireplaces, wines by the glass and lots of people working on their LinkedIn accounts.

And the coffee? Uhm…well, this may come as a shock to you all, but it really doesn’t taste very good. I mean, is that what we’re supposed to say? There’s some interesting stuff happening at those “stealth-not-stealth” cafes, but the truth is, the phenomenon of Starbucks and what it means to the city of Seattle has long since transcended what’s actually in your cup. Can you imagine what Starbucks might be if they were as innovative with their approach to roasting as they are with their interior design, advertising and reusable to-go products? Allow yourself to slide through that wormhole for a just a moment, into another dimension where Starbucks roasted their coffees to match palate considerations not rooted in the era of Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippin. With all their success, all their dominance, and the unfathomable war chest of cashola with which they’re able to perpetuate it, we’re all damn lucky that Starbucks still roasts the bejesus out of the vast, vast majority of their beans. Without an unbelievably dogged determination to stick to their roast profiles, who knows? Would there have been room for a third wave in the first place?

Stumptown Coffee Roasters

Opening two shops and a roastery in Seattle was a bold move for Stumptown – and, in retrospect, a harbinger of things to come. In terms of local allegiances and brand loyalty, Seattle can be a formidably xenophobic place. In 2007, Stumptown Coffee Roasters was cracking into the independent roaster niche carved out by the three V’s: Caffe Vita, Victrola and Vivace. The latter of these three was the only company to publicly welcome the Portland-based operation.

Stumptown built out two spaces located eight blocks away from each other on Capitol Hill: a roastery/cafe space on 12th Ave and a cafe next to Rudy’s Barbershop on Pine. Space-wise, both cafes have their loyalists and their pros and cons, but as a general rule, try 12th Ave for shots on the go or a front-row seat at their downstairs roasting operation, and use the cafe on Pine for work sessions, coffee dates, and to take in a pastiche of Seattle’s Pike/Pine cool-to-too-cool street scene. You will find exceptional coffee at both, made for you by some of the best baristas in the city.

Does Stumptown fit in Seattle? Yeah, man. Really awesome coffee raises the bar wherever it goes, and quality can’t help but carve out its own place to fit in. Loyalties die hard and some in the Seattle coffee world still view Stumptown as outsiders. And maybe that’s a good thing? Complacency, mediocrity and a reverence for what’s come before can quite easily hold back any scene, any culture, and pushing against those boundaries, while not easy, is ultimately a positive and inspiring endeavor.

BTW, Arabica Lounge on Olive and Denny makes a killer Stumptown Chemex and serves an emblematic shot of Haribender, a little House Blend drip goes great with your hangover hipster brunch at Linda’s on Pine, and the merging of Stumptown Coffee and craft cocktails underway at Liberty on 15th shows tremendous promise. (As a side note: Seattle’s cocktail scene is absolutely banging right now. If you tipple, consider tempering your coffee tour with a few “oh, snap” cocktails at places like Tavern Law, Needle and Thread, Zig-Zag Cafe, Bathtub Gin, and Liberty.)

Cafe Allegro Espresso Bar

Open since 1975, Allegro is the oldest continually operating cafe in the city of Seattle. There’s nothing particularly special about the coffee here - they offer a lovely peppermint tea - but by God, that space! Low-slung upon a brick-and-ivy alleyway directly across the street from the University of Washington, Allegro positively lives and breathes with a quarter-century’s worth of cram sessions, class hookies, goof-offs, professor-and-student half-dates, and all the trimmings of 35 years spent fostering the hustle-bustle environment of coffee shop academia. Their upstairs seating once ran on cigarette smoke, was positively fueled by the stuff, and their alleyway seating out front is at all times a veritable Algonquin Roundtable of academics, wandering junkies, nervous undergrads, exchange students, cute boys on bikes, aging, always-smoking Turkish 60-somethings, and some poor soul who’s late for class. In short, Allegro is the perfect college coffee shop, and an essential, quintessential constant in the Seattle cafe landscape. Long live Allegro!

Victrola Coffee Roasters

For as established as they are, open for 11 years and roasting since 2003, Victrola still represents the vanguard for specialty coffee in Seattle. They’re quite possibly the most consistent purveyor of quality single origin espresso shots in Seattle, and their offerings – when we last visited they had a fully-washed Ethiopia Nekempte Kemgin and the Ruli Musasa from Rwanda’s COE auction – come complete with extensive information and tasting notes.

Victrola’s three spaces vary wildly and are spread across Seattle. The roastery on Pike Street is sleek, functional and spacious, the perfect site for annual CoffeeFest parties; their Beacon Hill space is intimate and very much a part of its neighborhood; and 15th Avenue, our personal favorite, may very well be Seattle’s best example of a “second living room” cafe serving exceptional coffee.

Mostly. Mostly serving exceptional coffee. The shots aren’t always right; sometimes thimble-short, sometimes ashy, Victrola is perhaps a better bet for a macchiato or cappuccino than it is for a straight shot of espresso. When we went there all the time we grew accustomed to this wild variability, and took a “you win some, you lose some” attitude towards it; when we go there now as visitors, we play it safe, enjoy the space, and occasionally opt for beer and a sandwich instead of a shot. It’s awesome how involved they are in the community, and their public cuppings are informative and welcoming, but the coffee itself, while sometimes surprisingly delightful, is often far from perfect.

Trabant Coffee & Chai

It’s a sneaky kind of juggle, the realities of running a successful small business in a city with high rents, enormous tax and health code restraints, and a saturated market. Trabant Coffee and Chai has carved out a niche for itself in this milieu, and to do it, they’ve had to be mercenary at times. This is a cafe serving excellent coffee (from 49th Parallel roasters, based in Vancouver, BC) staffed by passionate and talented baristas, yet still beholden to the “& Chai” half of its masthead. Ask your average Kappa Kappa undergrad, and she’ll tell you Trabant makes the best chai in the U District. What gets lost in the shuffle is the fact, the delightful fact, that they’re also a real-deal destination for great shots of espresso.

Trabant’s cafe Downtown is huge, serene, ethereally beautiful and uniquely spaced, while the cafe in the U District is a hustle-bustle shitshow, crammed to the gills with study groups, local weirdos, chai seekers, coffee nerds and erotic fiction authors who refuse to leave after the doors are locked. 45th and University is a weird intersection, and that weirdness can sometimes spill into Trabant, a cafe where multi-tasking on your bar shift frequently entails calling the cops. Being open late probably doesn’t help matters, but it’s part of the fun. Recommended.

Other notables…

Seattle’s microroaster scene has a couple of names not well known outside the city. Herkimer Coffee‘s two cafe spaces (Phinney Ridge and North U District) are “modern and comfortable”, which is a nice way of saying “sort of boring”, but the coffee doesn’t suck, and they do have a nice wholesale presence on Capitol Hill (at Porchlight Coffee, 14th and Pike). Kuma Coffee, a microroaster based in Magnolia, are increasingly focused on sourcing their Latin American coffees via direct trade. They lack a showcase cafe space – their Wallingford shop on Stone Way is quite small, and keeps limited hours – but their coffees have improved greatly in the last year, winning over knowledgeable devotees. Well worth checking out.

Zoka thankfully didn’t go out of business like it was rumored they might. Their shop near Greenlake remains Seattle’s premier buzzing hive of laptop drone, and their menu still has quality options. A trip to Zoka provides its own kind of Seattle coffee history lesson; a remarkably large number of working Seattle baristas have put in time there over the years, and several former Zokacolytes have gone on to start roasters, win Sprudgie Awards, and do amazing things throughout the industry.

Aster Coffee Lounge in Ballard recently celebrated their 3 year anniversary, and they’re currently the only place in Seattle consistently serving Intelligentsia’s Black Cat espresso. They also offer a number of Stumptown Coffees via Clover and chemex, and have wine and beer on tap. While in Ballard, check out the Equal Exchange space in the Ballard Market, featuring perhaps the only Slayer machine in the world housed inside a grocery store.

Caffe Vita, and her down-the-hill spiritual brother Bauhaus, still exist and have largely  not changed in the last decade – both of these shops are total meat markets, scene queen see-and-be-seen fashion shows of the highest order. These cafes played host to endless Stranger ‘I Saw You’s” in the 1990s, even more countless Craigslist “Missed Connections” in the 2000s, and a presumably near-constant flood of OkCupid dates in the here-and-now. It used to be that both Bauhaus and Vita had upstairs smoking lounges; in fact, at Bauhaus shots of espresso were once paired with a single cigarette, and the shop still has packs for sale behind the counter. These days the tables and chairs in front of Vita and Bauhaus will have to suffice, offering Seattle’s premiere venue for second hand smoke, bottomless cups of urban ennui, the drone of youth and the hum of the pretty. All coffees served therein are strictly an afterthought - this applies to the growing army of Vita spaces throughout Seattle, Olympia, Portland and beyond, elbowing for a better view at the front of the show.

Neptune is a perfectly lovely outpost in the Greenwood neighborhood, a welcome source of Victrola-roasted, re-branded beans and a variety of pour over and shot options. Neptune’s owner is a USBC judge, and if challenged, he will gleefully kick your ass at the ping-pong table in the back corner. You’ve been warned.

Top Pot serves up an astonishingly large amount of coffee, some of it drinkable. The maple bars rule.

Fuel has multiple locations around the city. The space in Wallingford is right near where 1/2 of Sprudge lived when this site first started, and he goes there still from time to time to get some work done without having to run into anyone. Very neighborhoody, and charming for it.

A couple of non-cafe sights to see:

Some of the most interesting sights for the Seattle coffee tourist aren’t in cafes at all.  For example, while in Seattle one can:

Visit the La Marzocco USA factory, check out their souped up Strada MP, and catch a glimpse of their enormous stockpile of vintage, old school, and downright antique espresso machines. Kind, knowledgable people work here, and if you’re lucky, maybe you can enjoy a local microbrew pint from the La Marzocco USA Signature Series BS3 – the world’s first espresso machine kegerator.

Peruse the bevy of gear, toys, scales, cups and assorted ephemera available at the Visions Espresso storefront, and check out the doings at their Coffee Enhancement Lounge. We’ve been to events, lectures and charity throwdowns there over the years, and recommend you check them out in advance to see if anything is going on during your trip.

Get a cup to go from wherever you please, head down to the Alaskan Way waterfront, and gawk at the sheer physical beauty of where you are. Stroll along the docks, past restaurants and the Aquarium and that pier where they filmed “The Real World”, and breath in deep all the glorious saltwater air giving life to the world around you. There’s gorgeous mountains to one side, buttressed by a shimmering salt water inlet, itself dotted with ridiculously picturesque ferries departing to-and-fro from Seattle, destined for one port or another amidst the Puget Sound’s rabbit warren of tiny forest islands. To the other side, a city of glass and concrete, with a crumbling viaduct and enormous skyscrapers and hills, endless hills, pockmarked by the nooks and crannies of enterprise that gave birth to specialty coffee’s American journey long ago. But not that long ago… after all, it’s all still here…

A handy location guide to all the featured shops:

Lighthouse Coffee Roasters – 400 North 43rd Street, Fremont

Espresso Vivace - Sidewalk Bar, 321 Broadway East, Capitol Hill

Monorail Espresso – 520 Pike Street Seattle, Downtown

The Good Coffee Company – 818 Post Avenue, Pioneer Square / Waterfront

Starbucks - Moon Base Xenon, Outer Belts, Saturn

Stumptown Coffee Roasters – 616 East Pine and 1115 12th Ave (Roastery), both on Capitol Hill

Victrola Coffee Roasters – 310 East Pike Street (Roastery) and 411 15th Avenue East, Capitol Hill; 3215 Beacon Avenue South, Beacon Hill

Trabant Coffee & Chai – 1309 Northeast 45th Street, U District; 602 2nd Avenue, Downtown

Herkimer Coffee – 7320 Greenwood Ave, Phinney Ridge; 5611 University Way NE, U District

Kuma Coffee – 4110 Stone Way North

Zoka - Multiple locations, including two in Japan. Our favorite is at 2200 North 56th Street, Tangletown / Greenlake

Aster Coffee Lounge – 5615 24th Avenue Northwest, Ballard

Equal Exchange - 1400 Northwest 56th Street, Ballard (inside of Ballard Market)

Caffe Vita – Multiple locations

Bauhaus - 301 East Pine Street, Capitol Hill

Neptune Coffee – 8415 Greenwood Avenue North, Greenwood

Top Pot - Multiple locations, our favorite is 609 Summit Ave E, Capitol Hill

La Marzocco USA – 1553 NW Ballard Way, Ballard

Visions Espresso - 2737 1st Ave S, SODO

Fuel – Multiple locations, our favorite is 1705 N 45th St, Wallingford

*Correction: In an earlier version of this article, “Roy Street Coffee & Tea” was incorrectly identified as “openly flying the Mermaid Flag”. We regret the misstatement.

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