Meet the roasters behind Barcelona's coffee transformation

Barcelona drinks coffee at the bar. The cortado at a neighbourhood cafeteria is still the city’s default, and it is cheap, quick and often roasted with sugar in the old torrefacto style. Specialty coffee in Barcelona arrived as a reaction to that: lighter roasts, a filter menu with V60 and batch brew, and roasters who put the producer’s name on the bag.

NOMAD Coffee, three cafés in the centre

Jordi Mestre, Spanish barista champion in 2012 and 2013, opened NOMAD Coffee Lab in El Born in 2014 and started roasting in Poblenou a year later. NOMAD now runs three cafés. Coffee Bar, in El Born, is the original, a minimalist bar with a filter menu and the full catalogue of beans. Frutas Selectas, the largest of the three, took over an old fruit shop in Poblenou and serves pastries, sandwiches and a lunch menu. Petit NOMAD is an elbow bar a few steps from Plaça Catalunya, inspired by Italian cafés, with pastries from Pa de Kilo, the bakery NOMAD started in 2020. The range splits into espresso and filter roasts across a broad set of single origins, and the NOMAD academy runs courses.

Three Marks Coffee, Eixample

Three Marks serves in the Eixample, with outdoor tables beneath the trees, and roasts in Sant Adrià de Besòs, where it also runs its academy and a barista course. The team draws on design, music and creative collaborations as much as on coffee. Their coffees come from Ethiopia, Kenya, Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama. A second café is coming soon.

Morrow Coffee, Eixample

Morrow Coffee roasts the coffee it serves at its two cafés in the Eixample, one in the Nova Esquerra and one in the Dreta. Most lots come as two separate roasts, one for filter and one for espresso, from Ethiopia, Colombia and Nicaragua, with a co-fermented Ombligon from Finca Anaya in Colombia among them. Morrow also supplies coffee shops, restaurants and offices with coffee, equipment and advice.

SlowMov, Gràcia

François and Carmen opened SlowMov in Gràcia in 2015. Every lot carries its origin, process and variety, with the producer’s details alongside, and the packaging has been compostable since 2018.

Abyss, Poblenou

Abyss runs a roastery café in Poblenou, with a catalogue split into espresso, filter and decaffeinated coffees. The café and the roasting belong to the same business.

Syra Coffee, twenty shops across the city

Syra started in 2015 as a small takeaway café, with the mission “to democratise good coffee”. Ten years on it roasts weekly in Barcelona and runs twenty shops in the city, in El Born, Gràcia, Poble Sec, Sagrada Família, Poblenou and Sarrià among other neighbourhoods. Syra works directly with farms as small as one hectare.

Hidden Coffee Roasters, El Born and Granja Hidden

Mateo González and Carlos Moral met at a coffee workshop in 2015, started roasting in a Poblenou garage and now run a 30 kg Giesen at a headquarters elsewhere in the city. The El Born café is the older of the two. Granja Hidden, in the Eixample, took over the former Granja Vendrell, a century-old dairy, and painted the inside green. Hidden runs an SCA-certified coffee school and travels to origin most years, from Ethiopia and Kenya in 2017 to El Salvador and Nicaragua in 2025.

Right Side Coffee Bar, Gothic Quarter

Joaquín Parra founded Right Side Coffee Roasters in 2012, starting in his own car park, and restored two old roasters, a 1993 Probat and a 1959 UG22, at the roastery in Castelldefels. The roaster imports all of its green coffee directly and in 2023 opened its own café, Right Side Coffee Bar, a minimalist room in the old streets of the Gothic Quarter. Its motto is “never forget origins”.

D·Origen Casa Calvet, Eixample

D·Origen’s café occupies the ground floor of the Casa Calvet, the apartment building Antoni Gaudí completed in 1900 for a textile manufacturer, beneath the carved stone and wrought iron. The roaster behind it is a family business from Altea, on the Alicante coast, with a farm of its own on the slopes of the Barú volcano in Panama; it has roasted since 2012 and this is its only Barcelona café. Breakfast and brunch run alongside the roaster’s own coffees, dogs are welcome and there are no reservations.

Dalston Coffee, Raval

Borja Roselló left professional cooking for specialty coffee after finding it in Dalston, east London, and opened the first Dalston Coffee café in 2017 in the Raval. The roasting happens on Mondays and Wednesdays at La Garriga, north of the city, in small batches, with the farm, variety and process listed for each lot.

Salvatge Coffee, Gràcia and the port

Salvatge roasts weekly in Barcelona and only buys coffees that score above 85 points on the SCA scale. Its three lines, Tradicional, Exótico and Experimental, run from classic washed lots to the stranger processes. There is a shop in Gràcia and a second counter at the Moll de Barcelona cruise terminal.

Cafés El Magnífico, El Born

The Sans family created the Cafés El Magnífico brand in 1962, in a shop whose roots go back to a colonial goods store opened in 1919, and in 2018 bought La Portorriqueña, a Raval roastery founded in 1906. The El Born shop opened in 1989 and still hosts an open cupping one Saturday a month. There are two more shops, one in the Raval and one in the Eixample.

Onis, Eixample

Onis is a multi-roaster bar where the grinder changes with the guest roaster, Three Marks among them. In September 2026 the guest was Quo Coffee, a roastery from Skärhamn in Sweden. Onis is in the Eixample, a few blocks from D·Origen.

Otsu, Poblenou

Otsu, in Poblenou, is somewhere between a café, a kitchen and an atelier. The coffee is April from Copenhagen, and the menu reinterprets breakfast and lunch through Japan: a Tokyo breakfast of warm rice, slow-cooked egg and coffee broth, an egg sando, a miso caramel porridge, banana bread. In the afternoon the counter serves pastries and drinks.

Stamina Running, Poblenou

Stamina Running is a running shop, café and community space in Poblenou, with gear for road and trail, books and community runs that leave from the shop and end with coffee. The coffee comes from Abyss.

Back to Back, Poblenou

Back to Back is a specialty coffee and all-day brunch café in Poblenou, with a homemade bakery. It opened in December 2024. The house coffee comes from Harmony Roasters, a Barcelona roastery that roasted a limited Café Aniversario for the café’s first birthday, and Prolog from Copenhagen is among its other roasters. In the evenings it hosts Coffee Parties with DJs.

What you need to know about Barcelona specialty coffee

What is an American coffee in Spain? A café americano is an espresso lengthened with hot water. The local orders are the café solo (espresso), the cortado (espresso cut with a little milk) and the café con leche. In specialty shops you will also find flat whites, cappuccinos, lattes, V60 filter and batch brew.

Can you work or study in a coffee shop? It varies. Federal, the Australian-style brunch café with three branches in the city, welcomes laptops at its shared tables but is not a coworking space: seats for computers vary by site, and Wi-Fi is limited by time and at weekends. Smaller counters such as Syra’s takeaway shops and the elbow bar at Petit NOMAD are built for a quick stop.

Which cafés roast their own coffee beans? NOMAD, Three Marks, Morrow, SlowMov, Abyss, Syra, Hidden, Right Side, D·Origen, Dalston, Salvatge and El Magnífico all roast and sell bags to take home, most of them online too. Onis, Otsu, Stamina Running and Back to Back do not roast: Onis rotates guest roasters, Otsu serves April from Copenhagen, Stamina pours Abyss and Back to Back pours Harmony Roasters and Prolog.

Which neighbourhoods have specialty coffee shops? El Born and the Gothic Quarter put NOMAD’s Coffee Bar, Hidden, Right Side, El Magnífico and Syra within a short walk. The Eixample has Three Marks, Morrow, D·Origen, Granja Hidden and Onis. Gràcia has SlowMov, Salvatge and Syra. Poblenou has NOMAD’s Frutas Selectas, Abyss, Otsu, Stamina Running, Back to Back and a Syra.