Blogger Claire Cottrell over at Flavorpill / Flavorwire has cobbled together a pretty interesting list of the 20 most beautiful cafes in the world. It’s a pretty gosh darn global list, and we’ll level with you: Some of these cafes are places we’ve never heard of before, likely because they are not where our coffee-obsessed friends would take us while we’re in town. Learning about new places is a hoot.
Take D’espresso, a drop-dead gorgeous “library cafe” in Midtown Manhattan, serving Danesi Caffe espresso and maybe not on your standard NYC specialty coffee crawl. The pictures make it look like a must-see:
Or how about Kayaba Coffee, which we’d heard of before on account of this Tokyo Strand job, but ehrmagerd, look at this place:
What’s fun about this list is that it’s not particularly concerned with coffee quality. Though several of the best coffee roasters in the world are represented in Cottrell’s article, the architecture firms and the photography (poached from around the web) are what take center stage here, which really interesting and cool, if a bit scatterbrained. That said, we’re not totally sure Ms. Cottrell has actually been to a number of these cafes: the Blue Bottle Ferry Building location is not mobile, nor is it in a garage; Coava Coffee Roasters’ stunning lobby is actually a shared space with Bamboo Revolution, which is hard to miss when you visit (or do a modicum of research); and saying that Balzac’s Coffee Roastery is “considered to be the most spectacular coffee shop in all of Canada” is pushing it a bit, to be Canadian polite about the whole thing.
Still, cool list! Here’s the full 20 shops:
AIA Coffee & Restaurant by Inês Aia – Porto, Portugal
Zmianatematu by xm3 – Łódź, Poland
D’espresso by Nemaworkshop – New York, New York
Coutume Café by CUT Architectures – Paris, France
Loveat Jaffa by Studio Ronen Levin and Eran Chehanowitz – Tel Aviv, Israel
Handsome Coffee – Los Angeles, California
Coffee Collective – Copenhagen, Denmark
Koppi Kaffe & Roasteri – Helsingborg, Sweden
Kayaba Coffee by Yuko Nagayama & Associates – Tokyo, Japan
Little Nap Coffee Stand – Tokyo, Japan
Coava Brew Bar – Portland, Oregon
Four Barrel Coffee by Boor Bridges Architecture – San Francisco, California
Blue Bottle Coffee by Sagan Piechota Architecture – San Francisco, California
Blue Bottle Coffee – Williamsburg, Brooklyn
La Colombe Torrefaction by Obra Architects and Pablo Castro with Douglas Takeshi Wolfe – Soho, New York
Callas Cafe by David Collins – Budapest, Hungary
LAMILL Coffee Boutique by Rubbish Studio and BKarc – Silverlake, California
Confiserie Bachmann by HHF Architects – Basel, Switzerland
Starbucks Coffee Shop by Kengo Kuma and Associates – Dazaifu, Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan
Balzac’s Coffee Roastery – Toronto, Canada
Content sourced by Sprudge Hot Tipper Bronwen Serna.
