London now has a wide range of great independent cafes run by staff from all over the world and serving coffee in every imaginable style. I’ve chosen the ten best based on the style of coffee I drink (Flat White) and the style of cafe I like (chilled out Sunday afternoon magazine reading).

Your top ten would probably be different, but every one of these cafes is world class and could stand up in Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland, Wellington, New York, Paris or Milan. They are all worth a visit.

1. Department of Coffee

2. Workshop

3. Nude

4. Prufrock

5. Foxcroft & Ginger

6. Fernandez & Wells

7. Kaffeine

8. Tapped and Packed

9. Espresso Room

10. Notes

There are several great guide books for London cafes. My favorite is Independent Coffee London. The London Coffee Guide is the most comprehensive and authoritative guide, and Cafe Life London provides a more personal approach to finding the best coffee in London.

To me, the best way to explore the hidden cafes in London is using your iPhone or Android with FourSquare, London’s Best Coffee or the London Coffee Map app.

There are several great cafes (and cafe mini-chains) that I haven’t included here such as Monmouth, Sacred, Dose, Fix and Taylor Street Baristas. They are all excellent but if I had to pick only ten cafes to take a visitor from outside of London to, then the above list would be my pick.

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To escape the heat of a recent New York summer’s afternoon we ducked into the Toby’s Estate location in the Flatiron district of Manhattan. Gabrielle had her usual iced latte and my parents (who were visiting from New Zealand) opted for iced espressos. But I was feeling particularly adventurous and went for a new mint flavored drink on their menu, the Iced Espresso Julep.

The iced coffee julep is essentially an iced coffee with mint. But there are several things that make the Toby’s Estate version a lot better than your everyday Mint Iced Coffee. The things that stood out to me about the Toby’s Estate Mint Julep were:

1. Made with espresso rather than the on-trend cold brew. This gives the drink a nice strong and familiar coffee taste to build on.
2. Stiffly frothed milk. The cappuccino style frothed milk makes a nice addition that smooths out the other tastes.
3. The Mint is paired with Basil which gives a more complex cocktail-style flavor profile.
4. The infusion syrup is not too sweet which means you can actually taste the other ingredients.
5. The various ingredients are carefully layered so that the drink arrives looking like a hand crafted cocktail instead of a lime-green milkshake.

Overall, the espresso julep was cool, crisp, refreshing and easy to drink. I enjoyed it so much that I’ve been plotting excuses to go back to the (shopping heavy) Flatiron district. There are several New York trend spotters, cool hunters and coffee bloggers who have also noticed the drink on the menu, so I predict that by next summer it will be an option at plenty more hipster cafes in New York.

There’s a small cafe in Austin Texas called Houndstooth that’s been making an espresso julep for a couple of years now, but Toby’s Estate seems to be the first to bring it to New York and to do it well.

Since trying out the Toby’s Estate version, I’ve also been inspired to check out other iced coffee cocktails. Normally, I find that flavored iced coffees end up tasting horrible, but some of the New York iced coffee cocktails can be quite creative.

The SL28 Fizz from Under Line Cafe in Chelsea is made from grapefruit juice, tonic and espresso. It’s pretty bitter and I had to force myself to finish it. But I’m glad I ordered it and would recommend it to coffee hunters that are looking for something new. It’s a strong hit.

Imbibe Magazine has the recipe to make your own Toby’s Estate style Espresso Julep at home.

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In theory, nitro could be added to any style of iced coffee (espresso made, filtered or even instant), but the trend seems to be to add nitro to cold-brewed coffee. The nitro seems to balance out the sometimes tangy taste of a real cold-brew.

Stumptown coffee roasters are leading the charge and they have nitro on draft at their location in the West Village.

They were nice enough to let me try adding milk at the bottom of the pour to make a nitro latte, but honestly, it tastes just as good as plain black coffee without the milk.

Nolita Mart in Little Italy has their own keg system for iced coffee and they are serving Stumptown nitro as well as other iced coffees on tap.

For a good nitro coffee in Brooklyn, Hungry Ghost is serving the Stumptown nitro on draft.

Sahadi’s in Brooklyn Heights has a nitro cold brew from Gillies Coffee Roastery in Brooklyn. But honestly, it was just a bitter coldbrew with some gas infused into it. The Gillies nitro taught me that adding bubbles won’t make up for a bad tasting coffee. So I can’t recommend it.

If you’re lucky you can find Nitro Cold Brew in a can, which would allow you to try out this trend at home.

Other places the New York Post suggests to check out include Brooklyn Roasting in Flatiron and Plowshares in the Upper West Side.

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I’m a big fan of Product Hunt and use it every day at SeedInvest to help spot interesting new startups. Recently they featured a new stock photography company called Swauck. Some of their stock coffee photos got me so riled up that I’ve put together a compilation of my top 5 coffee sins in stock photography.

1. Stale coffee

You can tell from the popped bubbles around the edges of the cup that this coffee has sat for far too long. From a distance this coffee looks ok, but it probably tastes terrible.

2. Mottled crema

The weird froth like texture to this crema suggests a poorly made macchiato or an espresso that was drawn for too long.

3. Burnt coffee beans

These beans aren’t too bad, but if you look carefully several of them are so dark that any coffee you made with them would taste acidic and horrible.

4. Over steeped coffee

Coffee is only ever this dark if it has sat in a coffee maker for hours before being served. All the coffee taste is overpowered by the insipid tang of coffee grounds that have steeped too long.

Life is too short to drink bad coffee and bad coffee photography is helping to perpetuate a lack of taste. Demand more from your stock photos of coffee.

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Brooklyn Roasting Company

The Brooklyn Roasting Company options for beans are good but you need to purchase the annual subscription as a single upfront purchase and the delivery costs are additional. I’ve found their general house espresso roast to be far too dark for use in an Aeropress or a French Press plunger at home.

I’m still a fan of Brooklyn Roasting Company but their subscription service feels like its been tacked on as an afterthought.

Brooklyn Roasting Subscription: $14 for 12 ounces every two weeks

Stumptown

For me Stumptown is the leader in the New York coffee scene. On average all their roasts are slightly lighter and in keeping with the taste of modern coffee connoisseurs.

The Stumptown coffee bean delivery seems well put together but I get the sense it’s just a small part of their much larger business so it’s not really a focus for them

Stumptown Subscription: $20 for 12 ounces every two weeks

Blue Bottle Coffee

Blue Bottle is a Venture Capital backed startup. Last year they acquired a dedicated coffee subscription startup to re-brand it as part of their family of cafes and roasters. I find their espresso beans a bit weak and flavorless but their in-home subscription service allows for you to try different coffees each time so it should all balance out.

Their subscription business is obviously a key focus for them and they seem to have put the most effort into building the subscription model and allowing you to customize it.

Blue Bottle Subscription: $17 for 12 ounces every two weeks

Coffee Subscription Reviews

Over the coming months, I’ll be trying the different coffee bean delivery services in NYC to see which ones have the best beans, delivery and customer service. I’ll let you know what I find out.

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Espresso shots

The Starbucks Flat White uses ristretto espresso shots. A ristretto is an espresso shot with less water used, or the same amount of water in a smaller amount of time. Ristretto shots aren’t really necessary for a drink to be considered a Flat White, but the best baristas usually do pull a shorter ristretto shot when making small milk drinks like a Machiatto, Cortardo and Flat White. So it’s a nice touch by Starbucks.

Velvet textured milk

The texture of the milk is a large part of what makes a Flat White different to a cappuccino and a latte. In some high-end cafes all the milk-based drinks are steamed the same. But in most middle of the road cafes and in Starbucks, the Cappuccino has more froth whereas the Latte has less froth (and more liquid milk). The Flat White is halfway in between.

The smooth texture of well steamed milk is one of the hallmarks of a good Flat White. This velvet texture seems to be the intention of the Starbucks barista training but honestly, the variabilty in milk between stores (and baristas) is what makes the Starbucks Flat White so hit and miss.

White dot

The Starbucks flat white has a white dot poured in the latte art. This is a nice touch and a good way to visually see whether the milk has been properly textured. If all you see is a mushy orange mess, then you can already tell that the milk has been poorly made without even tasting the drink.

Ordering off the secret menu

The only size the Flat White is listed on the menu in is “Tall” which is the Starbucks equivalent of a “small” (although at 12 oz, it would be considered a large anywhere else). The baristas are perfectly happy to make a Flat White in the secret “off-menu” “Short” size which is the Starbucks equivalent of an “extra small” (and at 8 oz would be considered a “medium” size anywhere else).

Before the introduction of the Flat White, the off-menu Short Cappuccino was my go-to order at Starbucks. In theory, the Short Flat White should be the ultimate Starbucks drink for modern coffee connoisseurs. But the recipe seems to be dialled-in for the Tall size and the Short tastes bitter, dark and burnt. Personally, I now stick to the recommended Tall size.

Coffee credibility

To me, a large part of the motivation for adding the Flat White to the menu is to help Starbucks recapture the positioning of a coffee-focused cafe. The “third place” positioning has taken the company too far down the road of a confusing menu, free-wifi and public-toilets. Starbucks was starting to feel like a tired habit and a co-working space without a monetization strategy. The Flat White is part of a larger global push to focus back on coffee.

Whatever you think of the drink itself, it’s great to see the largest coffee chain in the world putting some serious effort into actually making coffee.

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The industrial complex that Pact is based in is owned by Club Workspace and is actually a loose affiliation of startups that have physical product businesses (instead of the tech-only startups that I’m used to in my day-job). Pact has deliberately located there, partially out of necessity, because they’re packing coffee (soon to be roasting as well), and also out of preference because they enjoy being surrounded by other entrepreneurial businesses who are also trading in physical products.

I sat down with the founder, Stephen Rapport, for a cup of freshly roasted Ethiopian coffee. We talked for a while about the increasing competition in the coffee delivery / subscription space from new players like Kopi and the old guard such as Square Mile. Stephen sees Pact’s real competition as the UKs continuing habit of drinking bad coffee at home. His comment was that:

“What really gets me excited is the idea of winning people over from instant and Nespresso. I want everyone to start drinking better quality coffee.”

Customer-led

Stephen and the team are conscious of the balance between building a customer-centred business and following their own vision for the company. For example, the Head of Coffee, Will, chooses a range of new beans for each season, but they invite 50 top customers to help them make the final selections. Stephen’s comment was that:

“The billion dollar businesses of tomorrow will almost all be customer-led.”

Stephen is well aware of the traditional criticism that customer-led businesses can be less innovative because , such as the comment from Steve Jobs (quoting Henry Ford) who said “If I had asked people what to build; I would have made a faster horse.” In Stephen’s mind, this concern is increasingly outdated because data, analytics and improved community-management allow businesses to listen to their customers without being diverted from their core vision.

Core values

The company’s core values include “learn from data”, “be customer centred” and “make shit happen”. These values are posted the walls of the light, airy space where 30 people make their home in an open-plan office with chairs upholstered in coffee bags and walls lined with used coffee pallets. The team obviously all love coffee and their kitchen has colour coded sections for preparing coffee using AeroPress, drip, French press and espresso.

The whole office stops work at midday every day for every single employee to make welcome calls to newly joined customers. The team thank the new customer for joining and checking that the new customer found what they were looking for.

Transparency

Openness is a huge part of the Pact company culture and the monthly board meetings are held around the kitchen table (in the middle of the open plan space). Apparently several investors found it a bit uncomfortable at first to be discussing long-term strategy in an open plan environment, but Stephen stuck to his guns and the directors and investors have since become so enamoured with the process that several of them are now asking their own portfolio companies to adopt the same style of open board meetings.

One of the tools that the business uses to learn and collect feedback from their customers is an online product development forum which includes a voting on suggestions. The company made a commitment to their customers to either embrace the most popular suggestions and focus on building those, or to honestly and transparently justify why they weren’t going to prioritise a new feature. For example, one of the customers flippantly made the suggestion that they halve the price of the coffee and this was up-voted. Stephen logged in to personally explain the cost structure and business model of the company and why the price that they were charging was fair and appropriate for the industry. By itself this is a simple matter of online customer service, but it speaks to their deeply held belief in transparency and openness.

Vision

Another feature that was requested in the online forum was the ability to make a one-off order of beans instead of signing up for a subscription. This is a good example of a feature that might well please the customer, but is not part of the core vision of the company. They see themselves as building long-term relationships with their users and providing flexible, on demand delivery of coffee, so allowing one-off purchases doesn’t fit with that model. Stephen went as far as to suggest that if someone is not the type of customer that suits Pact, then the team has no problems with recommending that people try out a company that specialises in one-off deliveries.

Annoying a few connoisseurs

A real tension that I spotted in the business is how to make good coffee more accessible to the masses while maintaining credibility with true connoisseurs. Pact probably err on the side of accessibility, but they have a deep love of coffee which I think helps maintains their relevance with connoisseurs. Stephen had recently caught up for a coffee with one of the founders of Innocent Drinks who told him a cautionary tale from when Innocent decided to allow their smoothies to be stocked in MacDonald’s. This caused an uproar with the old-guard of loyal, faithful Innocent smoothie drinkers. There’s an obvious parallel to Pact Coffee in terms of their willingness to make coffee accessible to the mass market without alienating coffee snobs.

Ambition

The team are incredibly ambitious and, without any irony, talk about the potential for the company to become a billion pound business. Stephen is very aware of the dangers of defining an engine of growth for the business, but they have made an informed choice to balance their drivers across viral, marketing and product. They see all three of these as engines of growth and are constantly striving to optimise this growth while still maintaining their core focus on the customer experience and community.

Stephen said he gets an emotional and intellectual kick out of growing a product business because of the way it scales. When he sold his previous company to Airbnb, he founded Pact partially because he wasn’t willing to just sit on the bench. Stephen has been through the Seedcamp startup accelerator process and took early investment from Connect Ventures, alongside several early-stage angel investors.

Critics

The company has had its fair share of critics, both from the boutique coffee scene such as Tim Styles of Workshop who has occasionally had a go at Pact on Twitter for not being purist enough. To mass-market competitors who know that Pact is doing things that they should have been doing years ago. These critics do have a point and Pact is walking a fine line between accessibility and connoisseurship.

When trying to position themselves between boutique coffee delivery companies (who provide one-offs) and regular subscription-based businesses, the team talk about the difference between being an aspirin (relieving immediate pain) or a vitamin (longer term pleasure). The subscription part of the business provides the convenience of never running out of coffee. But the website allows for the fun of discovering new beans and new tastes. The aspirin and vitamin metaphor is common in the angel investing industry but I think that Pact is going to have to work hard to balance the need maintain quality as they scale.

Culture

The energy in the office is palpable and it defies belief that more people in the UK don’t know about Pact. The culture that they are building includes all the things I look for in a startup including: radical transparency, authentic community engagement and customer-centred design. The company’s explorations in paid marketing such as Reddit or coupons and new subscription offers feel tentative. But the depth of integrity in the business around what they are trying to build is absolutely unquestionable.

As Pact grows they have three variables to consider. Currently they deliver quality coffee to individual customers in the United Kingdom. To they can expand beyond coffee into related products, expand beyond individuals into business, or expand beyond the UK. They have just launched a business service called Coffee Run. And without giving the game away, Stephen hinted that the next step for Pact is likely to be taking on overseas markets.

Pact is already achieving rapid growth, currently their estimates are that around thirty thousand cups of coffee are made using Pact beans every day and their goal is to push that up to a million cups of coffee a day. Stephen commented that the metric that he personally uses for growth is how many smiles they can generate a day and instead of feeling trite, it sounded like he really meant it.

You can sign up for regular coffee delivery on their website or follow along with their startup journey on their blog.

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I think the flat white was an attempt to get cafes to make the sort of coffee that New Zealanders were used to making at home. To understand why this is, we need to go back to how coffee was made in the home in New Zealand before cafes became a popular place to hang out.

Black and white coffee at home

The basic convention for describing coffee prepared at home in New Zealand is to refer to coffee without milk as black and coffee with milk as white. So a common question you would ask a guest is “Would you like your coffee black or white?”

Most coffee at home in New Zealand is made using a french press or as we call it, a plunger. This style of coffee makes for a nice long mug of black coffee or a warm comforting white coffee made with just a splash of milk.

In New Zealand, a shot of espresso is called a short black. Every other coffee name is built on that convention. For example, an espresso topped up with hot water is called a long black.

Born from the clash of cultures

My theory on the origins of the flat white is that it comes from the overlap between customers used to simple plunger coffee at home and the birth of Italian cafes in Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland run by new immigrants from Europe.

The Italian proprietors would be used to accepting orders using the Italian naming conventions for coffee. The basics being an espresso and cappuccino. When confronted with customers ordering a “black coffee” or a “white coffee” they would have been thoroughly confused. Those ordering a black coffee could probably mumble through by requesting some additional hot water, but those ordering a coffee with milk would often end up with a cappuccino.

The Italian terms that describe the simple coffee drink that the average customer wanted were probably too hard to pronounce. For example the cortado, dopio or macchiato could all have been perfectly serviceable drinks but the names wouldn’t have been considered simple and there are no easy anglicised terms for these drinks. Instead it came down to a battle between the cappuccino and the latte to be the “white coffee” of the antipodes.

Why not order a cappuccino?

The cappuccino in New Zealand was made with stiff foam and almost no liquid milk and was considered a drink for children because it is usually served with chocolate sprinkles.

Milk in Australia and New Zealand comes only from free range organic cows because that’s all we have in Australia and in New Zealand. When frothed aggressively, New Zealand milk can form an extremely stiff foam with large bubbles. The texture of a cappuccino in New Zealand can be almost like marshmallow.

Ordering a white coffee and then being handed a cappuccino with chocolate sprinkles would not be considered masculine enough for an Australian bloke.

Why not order a latte?

The latte in New Zealand was made with cold milk or heated milk with almost no foam and was considered a weak drink for intellectuals, political liberals and new mothers. The result of ordering a latte in New Zealand can vary wildly from a tall glass of cold milk drowning a lone shot of espresso to a tiny machiatto and all the way back out to a giant slurping bowl. Not a safe bet for the man on the go.

The evolution of the flat white

This leaves a normal Kiwi bloke with no good options for ordering a plain white coffee with milk like they were used to at home. So the evolution of the flat white probably went something like this:

Customer: One ‘white coffee’ please.
Cafe: Hands customer a cappuccino.
Customer: That’s too frothy. Can I have one with plain milk?
Cafe: Hands customer a latte.
Customer: That tastes weak and milky. Could you make something that has more froth than a latte and less froth than a cappuccino?
Cafe: Hands customer an espresso in a mug with a nice even blend of froth and milk.
Customer: Perfect. I’m going to call this a ‘flat’ white.

Why the term “flat”?

In New Zealand we use the term “flat” to describe soft drink (or soda) that has lost its fizz and doesn’t have any bubbles. So “flat” seems like a natural term for Kiwis to use to describe a coffee with fewer bubbles than a cappuccino (which was the dominant espresso beverage in NZ in the 1980s).

International spread of the flat white

The reason the individual originator of the term flat white is shrouded the mystery is that the term probably involved from dozens or even hundreds of these small interactions where Italian cafe proprietors gradually began to understand what their customers wanted.

Despite its present hipster incarnations in London, New York and Berlin, the flat white began life as an attempt to recreate the comforting builder’s mug of plunger coffee with a dash of milk.

The drink that the term describes has probably evolved since then to become a little smaller and little more frothy than a simple “white coffee” at home. The flat white has come a long way from its humble origins. It’s now one of the greatest cultural exports of Australia and New Zealand.

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Luckily I found a couple of iPhone applications that transformed my experience of exploring London to find new cafes. The London Coffee Map and London’s Best Coffee are the two apps I use the most to find new cafes. So you can imagine my excitement when I joined the equity crowdfunding platform Seedrs in January and discovered that the makers of London’s Best Coffee were raising investment for their business through Seedrs.

Blue Crow Media makes a mix of mobile applications for iPhone and Android as well as physical paper maps. The key to their success seems to be choosing the venues selectively enough that people can trust the logic of “if it’s in the coffee app, then it must be good.”

One of the things I like most about the company is their sense of design. Designer Chris Fraser from Finland worked on the early versions of the apps and Katie Marcus from London (with experience at Makeshift, Poke and Sidekick) worked on the more recent versions.

Derek from Blue Crow Media is offering 5% of the company for £50,000. So far, he’s had just over 40 investors commit around £14,000. The company is planning to use the funds to create new applications in new cities and new categories. You can check out the Blue Crow Media campaign on Seedrs.

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Small independent cafes are usually hidden away in interesting neighbourhoods so hunting for good coffee is a good way of hunting for the cultural heart of a city. When I travel I always go searching for a flat white. – Even if I fail, the effort leads me down interesting alleyways in new neighbourhoods.

Last weekend I ran to Sacred Cafe in Caledonia Rd (only an hour from Clerkenwell) but a fun way of breaking up a long run. It got me thinking about cafes as “destinations” for exploring. So I did a little research and thought back on my early days in London when we franticly ran around the city trying to visit as many places as possible.

Tim Chester from NME did a multi-day pilgrimage across London in the Great Flat White Hunt. He had some comments, quite rightly, about Taylor Street Baristas and Dose not being places to linger. But when you are coffee orienteering then it doesn’t matter. Tim also made a Google Map of the cafes he visited.

There are several good routes to take around London. For example, Nick Wade’s Disloyalty Card is a great excuse to explore.

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