Portland’s Best Indie Coffee Shops

Jun 06, 2024

ByJordan Michelman, Matthew Trueherz, Karen Brooks, Katherine Chew Hamilton, and Isabel Lemus KristensenApril 5, 2023

Cà phê sữa đá and an ube latte from Portland Cà Phê.

Image: Michael Novak

In case you missed it: Portland’s coffee shops are making noise again. Across the city, a renaissance is rumbling with deeply personal takes on what a coffee can be. An earthy pistachio latte that pays homage to Korea’s specialty coffee culture. A rock and gem shop where amateur geologists commune over cappuccinos. A bar in a centuries-old warehouse diving deep into Mexican coffees and Japanese teas, with occasional one-offs from the owner’s personal collection.

Intrigued? It’s just a glimpse.

For months now, we’ve scoured the city for a fresh definition for Portland’s independent coffee scene and where to find it, exciting newcomers to the once-buzzy artisan roasters still defining neighborhoods. In a companion essay, our project collaborator, James Beard–winning journalist and Sprudge cofounder Jordan Michelman, argues why Portland coffee still matters in 2023. Bottom line: The conversation is shifting.

The city’s vaunted third-wave coffee scene, with its bearded, tattooed baristas and parody-level seriousness, has given way to a post-wave moment, open to new approaches and flavors. Snobbery is out; a democracy of drinking is in. The upshot: Never have the options been greater or more dynamic, including food that goes way beyond typical coffee shop snacks, from Japanese shaved ice to the perfect fried egg sandwich. Right now, you can visit a shop every day and never have the same experience twice, even at the same shop.

Consider this your guide to the wealth of places, new to old, remaking the case that Portland is a great indie coffee city. This is our focus, rather than the local mini-chains you might expect to find. Explore, have fun, and order what you like.

Pearl district

One of the newest cafes in town, Abba’s menu is influenced by Korean specialty coffee culture. Think black sesame lattes, creamy and sweet and topped with a dusting of black sesame powder, or an excellent pistachio latte, where earthy greenness blends beautifully with espresso. All the coffee here is roasted by Abba; the brand started roasting in 2019, but did not open its first proper cafe until early 2023, a light and airy space in the heart of the Pearl District with ample seating to read, study, or hang out with friends. This is an excellent new addition to Portland’s coffee scene, one the city is just getting to know as a cafe with room to grow and delight. —JM

525 NW 11th Ave

Humboldt, Mt. Tabor

Both the Hawthorne and the namesake Albina location are true “neighborhood-neighborhood” coffee shops, with a patched floor and tagged bathrooms vibe. But Albina Press, open since 2004, was a leader in Portland’s third-wave coffee scene. Its influence spread to coffee shops around town: Billy Wilson, who went to open Barista, and Matt Higgins, now the CEO of Coava Coffee, worked there. Today, the cafe’s straightforward espresso drinks and French press by the cup are made from Coava beans. Both spots host an impressive rotating series of shows by local artists in their cozy, living room–like cafes. At either end of town, expect a room full of people catching up with friends or rattling off the afternoon’s emails until closing hour, 6 p.m. —MT

5012 SE Hawthorne Blvd; 4637 N Albina Ave

Foster-Powell

My personal favorite cafe in the city, a gem in the marly schist, a coffee bar like no other in Portland (or really the country), Carnelian Coffee is equal parts coffee bar and rock-hound haunt, a hub for amateur geologists and stone enthusiasts to gather, drink coffee, and soak in the million-year-old vibes. There’s just something about this place, a microroaster and single cafe location so entirely unpretentious and of itself, glowing under the citrine-yellow UV rock lights and serving a classically straightforward menu of teas and coffees with a couple of unusual inclusions, like a Lyle’s Golden Syrup drizzle on your cappuccino. There are rocks and gems throughout the entire interior, hanging shelves heaving with quartz and amethyst, gem displays everywhere, books for sale for the geo-curious. Maybe that’s why I love it so much. Can rocks make the coffee taste better? Something keeps me coming back. —JM

6923 SE Foster Rd

Case Study Coffee brings the no-frills approach.

Image: Stuart Mullenberg

Multiple Locations

Case Study’s cafes vary quite a bit in size, but consistently serve reliable cups of unfussy coffee made with beans roasted in house. An appreciation for “no-frills, approachable” coffees guides its focus as a roaster. Drip and espresso blends do most of the heavy lifting and make room for three seasonally rotating, single-origin coffees, one of which is always naturally processed. The shop on SW 10th is big and great for taking a meeting. Alberta is great for grab-and-go. Sandy has long tables reminiscent of a college library. Every cafe has a worn-in charm full of distressed wood and industrial lamps, reminding you they’ve been at it for over a decade, now with five locations across town.  —MT

Library nooks and velvet armchairs capture the vibe at Cathedral Coffee.

Image: Stuart Mullenberg

Cathedral Park

This St. Johns’ community favorite exemplifies what a neighborhood coffee shop can be. The recently launched house roasting program slaps nostalgia-inducing names onto its many roasts, like fruit cups, raspberry cream soda, and caramel apple. The large indoor area features graffiti-art walls, long live-edge wooden tables, and a little library nook with velvet armchairs and '90s coffee shop vibes. Don't forget to scan the pastry case, stacked full of housemade baked goods. The honey ham and pepper jack cheese turnover is a compact, on-the-go breakfast, while the chocolate chip banana bread and a cold brew make for a nice midday pick-me-up. —Sam Stites

7530 N Willamette Blvd

Downtown

Beautiful chaos reigns at Courier, a scrappy, self-made world, absolute in its commitments. That includes a tiny counter with an imaginary line down the middle. The left side is devoted to Joel Domreis’s longtime coffee gem Courier; the right side is home base for Sakiko Setaka’s Soen, a whirling Japanese kitchen known for seasonal kakigori (shaved ice) made with an extreme handmade ethos and organic farm berries. Somehow, the couple defied the gods of reason to create a safe place for weirdness, with wonderful coffee, rolled-to-order norimaki rolls, and vinyl music in the mix. The coffee beans are exceptional—Domreis roasts each batch himself, a process he calls “watching the behavior of the beans.” Perfect cortados arrive in teeny jars. Mochas sing with super creamy vibes and high-brow chocolate, artful milk-etched leaves trailing off into random wisps, a reminder that life is not always perfect. Baking is a sub-genre here, including a masterful cannelé. But the real house obsession is ice, via a private well. From a giant ice block, Domreis hammers out primal, rough-edged, three-inch-long chunks to float like wild archipelagos in Courier’s iced coffee. It’s also the secret to Soen’s feathery kakigori. Bottom line: a treasure. —KB

923 SW Oak St

Kicks and caffeine come together at Deadstock Coffee.

Image: Stuart Mullenberg

Downtown

Often imitated, never duplicated. There is only one Deadstock Coffee, founder Ian Williams’s game-changing crossover collab of coffee and sneaker culture inspired by his own journey at Nike. Across the better part of a decade (an early cart version of Deadstock opened in 2015), Williams and his team of collaborators have built Deadstock into that rarest of municipal destinations, the sort of place beloved by both locals and tourists alike, alive every morning with conversation and music and art—both on the walls, and on everyone’s feet (this is the place to show off your favorite sneaker pair). The shop’s signature Lebronald Palmer is the rightly famous star from the shop’s secret menu, a cool-down refresher of coffee, sweet tea, and lemonade. But my favorite drink here is a straight espresso—they’re pulling some of the city’s best shots from their own outstanding in-house roasting program. —JM

408 NW Couch St, Ste 408

Boise

Originally a teeny-tiny beloved Sellwood shop, today Either/Or resides in a single North Portland location as a daytime cafe serving espresso flights, inventive coffee cocktails, Bloody Marys, breakfast burritos, and English muffin sandwiches. But it’s still got the same DIY charms of the original shop, with a cult following around the city (just see how many local chefs you can spot wearing their Either/Or hats with the adorable fat cat and watermelon logo). Chai lovers likely know the house sister company, Tanglewood Chai, which makes a range of chai syrups served here and at cafes around town. Coffee beans are sourced from several roasters, but more often than not, you’ll see bags from Portland's Heart Coffee Roasters on the counter. —MT

4003 N Williams Ave

The butterfly pea latte from Electrica.

Image: Courtesy Electrica

Northwest District

In a big-picture sense, Electrica—a cafe collaboration between barista Seiji Nanbu and Republica Hospitality Group—feels like a sort of “proof of concept” moment for the city’s modern coffee scene, drawing equally from the coffee traditions of Japan and Mexico to create something distinctly at home in Portland. But zoom in and you’ll find a cafe experience that stands on its own, outside of any bigger narrative, with a focus on pour-over coffees sourced from Mexico and roasted by Reforma Roasters in a stunning cafe space that doubles as a lobby for the homewares brand Schoolhouse Electric. Nanbu has traveled extensively between Japan and the Pacific Northwest, and has proven uniquely capable at crafting not just an exciting coffee experience, but also one of the city’s best destinations for high-quality tea, working with local purveyors like Mizuba Tea Company but often featuring specials and one-offs from his personal collection (think chamomile hojicha or rare, small-production sencha). There’s just one cafe I know of like this on earth—teas of Japan, coffees of Mexico, panaderia pastries and wagashi treats in a Pacific Northwest reclaimed industrial lobby—and so, of course, it’s here. Where else? —JM

2181 NW Nicolai St

Sunnyside, Boise

Coffee culture in Portland has deep roots. The Fresh Pot has been open as an independent Portland cafe since 1997—it was the first wholesale cafe to serve Stumptown Coffee—and the Mississippi Avenue location has been around since 2002, housed inside a former Rexall Drugs building that dates back more than a hundred years. It’s hard to imagine the amount of history that’s crossed that intersection at Mississippi and Shaver, but you feel it in the creaky floorboards inside the Fresh Pot, a space that once held a classic drug store soda fountain, and today hosts one of the city’s great unchanged Gen X–era coffee shops. Get a black coffee to stay and sit outside if it’s not raining; the neighborhood sure has changed over the decades, but life flows by just the same. —JM

3729 SE Hawthorne Blvd, 4001 N Mississippi

Montavilla, Arbor Lodge

Quietly, Futura Coffee Roasters has been percolating since 2022 with friendly purpose, a regenerative soil mission, and the city’s best drip coffee, served with a heartfelt “Here you go, friend.” House beans walk on the wide side, tapping natural processes that lean into fruity flavors. Most are grown at coffee farming projects in Panama and Colombia, owned by partners Felipe Sardi and Sebastian Villamizar, then roasted in Portland by cofounder CJ Speelman. Options include house chai, considered seasonal lattes, and blends named for Futura's planet-hugging philosophy: "Act, Love, Change." No fancy equipment for that drip coffee, two options daily, single origin or a blend. Baked goods from grain-forward Tabor Bread include an atomic sourdough croissant, super crackly and more sour than sour. Its synergy with the house coffee borders on otherworldly. You can also find two eggs with buttered toast for $5; add carrot miso or bacon from Clackamas County’s proudly carbon-negative Campfire Farms. Not one thing makes it stand out; it’s all the things: mindful sourcing, roasting, consistency, and service. —KB

7201 NE Glisan St; 1507 N Rosa Parks Way

Buzzy settings and stellar seasonal lattes are a Good Coffee signature.

Image: Stuart Mullenberg

Multiple Locations

Founding brothers Sam and Nick Purvis are lifelong coffee industry veterans, and together they’ve built Good Coffee into perhaps the region’s premier indie chain, with six locations from Troutdale to Slabtown to PDX Airport Concourse B. My favorite Good is inside the Woodlark Hotel downtown, a stunning cafe that captures much of the hotel lobby across a sprawling clutch of deep, cozy couches and modern tables, buzzy with big-city energy and high-quality drinks to match. The seasonal lattes at Good are always an event, offering daring, uncommon flavors like smoked fig and allspice, hojicha vanilla, and cherry chili cacao. —JM

Books and coffee. What more could you want at Guilder?

Image: Isabel Lemus Kristensen

Alameda, Downtown, cully

There’s a world’s worth of recommendations to give for Guilder Coffee, whose flagship two-floor cafe on NE Fremont and 23rd and excellent roasting brand, Junior’s, provides steady leadership, education, and community building for the city’s coffee scene. But it is their second cafe, opened in 2021 inside of the legendary Powell’s City of Books on Burnside, that I think deserves all the flowers. Taking over the cafe space inside of Powell’s was no easy assignment; this is a city institution deeply identified with Portland’s municipal soul, through which many thousands of locals and visitors flow each day. Guilder stepped in with pandemic uncertainties still raging, and downtown reeling. What they’ve built feels monumental, a cafe of the scale and execution befitting one of the world’s great bookstores, with a bank of stadium seating, swopping midcentury chairs, and a perpetually packed communal table, perfect for Powell’s, our city living room. The coffee is outstanding, both to stay and to go—consider adding a bag of beans to the contents of your Powell’s tote. And if you need a beer later after all that literary thought, Junior’s now has its own cafe at NE 72nd and Prescott in collaboration with Upright Brewing. —JM

2393 NE Fremont St; 1005 W Burnside St; 7151 NE Prescott St (Junior's)

Kerns, Woodstock

Founded in 2009 by retired pro snowboarder Wille Yli-Luoma and his wife Rebekah, Heart is emblematic of coffee cool in Portland. The sleek, minimal, and extremely intentionally curated cafes are the face of a widely distributed and well-respected roaster. Heart’s coffees follow suit, with the seasonally adjusted stereo blend serving as your anything-but-casual daily driver and carefully sourced (by physically visiting the farms that produce them) single-origin offerings; some of the resulting coffees are named after the farmers who grew them. Order a single-origin espresso and ask your barista to tell you about it to get the full experience. There’s no Wi-Fi at either spot, making it ideal for unplugging and focusing on a good cup of coffee. —MT

2211 E Burnside St, 5181 Woodstock St

Downtown, Goose Hollow

Though most people think of tea as China's caffeine, these self-described Chinese coffee shops aim to show a rarely seen side of Chinese culture through coffee. In J Coffee, just off the Park Blocks, serves Super Joy beans, while Super Joy's roastery in Goose Hollow also houses a coffee shop. Though their specialty drinks are less compelling now—no more osmanthus lattes and soy sauce caramel lattes—Super Joy's Sichuan peppercorn mocha and In J's lychee-rose sakura latte still show the cafes' rich potential. Plus, where else can you buy bags of freshly roasted single-origin coffee beans from Yunnan, China? Co-founder Joe (Wenbo) Yang has stepped back from his ownership role but is still roasting the cafes' beans, while co-founder and barista Topher Ou is now helming both cafes. —KCH

1431 SW Park Ave, 1401 SW Yamhill St

Rose City Park

Step up to the sleek silver Airstream bus at the Rose City Food Park to find a secret oasis of real-deal Italian cappuccinos and daily Bakeshop croissants, open since 2019. Gregarious owner-barista JJ Johnston will ask you if you like your cap wet or dry, pull the shot using Spella espresso beans, and pour the milk at the window so you can see the coffee art happen in real time. He’ll ask you to take a sip—the milk will nearly be cascading out of the cup’s rim—and let him know if everything’s to your liking. If you don’t want to cross the river to Spella’s new little cafe in Harrison Square, this is where you go for the best dark-roasted, no-nonsense cappuccino, not to mention the refreshing cold caffe shakerato for sunny days. —KCH

5235 NE Sandy Blvd

Eliot

This brand-new Filipino-owned coffee shop got its start as an occasional pop-up at Southeast Portland Filipino restaurant Magna, and just recently opened in the Gotham Building near the Fremont Bridge. Kalesa serves its own roast, slinging drinks like coconut cold brew topped with creamy ube whip, coconut pandan cream soda, sweet corn shakeratos, and mango calamansi with Sweet Creature PDX chamoy. Even the pastry case is a show of Filipino pride from various local bakers, including pan de sal from breakfast sandwich cart breakout Balong that's perfect for dipping in coffee, Allie G’s fluffy coffee pandan mamon, and pandan and ube crinkle cookies from the Kalat House. —ILK

722 N Page St

Woodstock

This homey, rustic cafe is everything you could want in a neighborhood coffee shop and more. Espresso drinks are skillfully assembled with Coava beans, and if you’re lucky, you might get a cappuccino made by star barista Morgan Eckroth, the 2022 US Barista champion. Tea drinkers get just as much love—no generic tea bags here—with a full menu of caffeinated and herbal teas from Aesthete Tea served in glass pots, plus Mizuba matcha and One Stripe chai. But Keeper is also a bakery, stocking its pastry case with sweet and savory scones, hefty quiches, an impeccable pecan sticky bun, and weekend breads like focaccia and brioche. A creaky wooden floor, a menu hand-painted on a mirror, and mismatched vintage chairs and tables add to the charm, making it equally suited for coffee dates or a morning of remote work. —KCH

4515 SE 41st Ave

Less and More, a coffee shop and an ethos, apparently.

Image: Isabel Lemus Kristensen

Downtown

Nestled inside a decommissioned bus shelter, Less and More is one of Portland’s best coffee shops, a reason in itself to take a trip downtown. Owner Ryan Jie Jiang combines house-roasted beans into beautifully layered, delicately flavored, and not-too-sweet specialty drinks, often drawing from his Chinese Korean heritage. Toasty, nutty black sesame cream tops an iced latte, while ssuk, that bitter, grassy plant also known as mugwort, makes for a refreshing non-coffee drink. Cloud cream, a thick cap of lightly sweetened half-and-half, or tiramisu cream, a silky layer of mascarpone, can also top off your lattes. Even without flavors, the espresso is done well—but Jiang proves that good coffee can also be playful and highly personal. Grab a pastry from the esteemed Bakeshop bakery while you’re at it. Seating is limited to just a few bar seats around the bus station’s edge, but an additional brick-and-mortar location is coming in April. —KCH

1003 SW Fifth Ave

Never a dull drink at Never Coffee.

Image: Stuart Mullenberg

Sunnyside

Never Coffee's Belmont space anchors a particularly creative block of Southeast Portland, making it an easy caffeine destination for your next visit to Ardor Wines, Movie Madness, or the carts at Bite on Belmont. The shop’s petite interior balances monochrome with pops of color—the rainbow lettering on the espresso machine, the Birds of Paradise array of the coffee bags—alongside outstanding signature drinks like the Midnight Oil latte with licorice syrup, or the Oregon Latte with hops and dulce de leche. There’s ample picnic table seating out front, which flows throughout the day from serving the cafe to the food carts to the wine bar. —JM

4243 SE Belmont St

Creston-Kenilworth, Eliot

When you order a Vietnamese coffee in the United States, it may not have been made with coffee beans from Vietnam, but with a coffee-chicory blend from Cafe Du Monde, the New Orleans cafe that uses beans of undisclosed origin. But that’s not the case at Portland Cà Phê, which sources 100 percent of its beans from Vietnam. Though arabica coffee is more prominent in upscale coffee in the United States, Vietnam is the world’s biggest producer of robusta beans, which have historically been considered inferior. But the Good Morning blend showcases robusta’s beauty, while the house blend combines equal parts of both, proving that Vietnamese coffee deserves its spot in the craft coffee world. Get a cà phê sữa dá with housemade condensed milk or a bright, marshmallowy ube latte made from the actual root itself, preferably topped with salty cream cheese foam. Plus, it's hard to ask for better coffee shop edibles than chewy rice flour doughnuts from Heyday and banh mi from House of Banh Mi. —KCH

2815 SE Holgate Blvd, 2601 NE Martin Luther King Jr Blvd

Beaumont-Wilshire, Northwest District

Looking for proof that your cafe has reached “neighborhood icon” status? Try standing in line at 8:15 a.m. behind a half-dozen 8th graders ordering mochas and matchas, a scene you’ll find inside the Fremont location of Prince Coffee each morning before the bell rings at nearby Beaumont Middle School. Drawing on Dutch coffee culture (get the Stroop Latte with caramel and cinnamon) and featuring a rotation of guest roasters from Northern Europe, Prince is the closest you can get to Amsterdam in Portland without booking the Delta direct flight to Schiphol. A second location on NW 19th opened in late 2022, with expanded food options (including tinned fish platters and Chex Mix) and pours from women winemakers by the glass, blurring the line between neighborhood cafe and wine bar. —JM

4523 NE Fremont St, 915 NW 19th Ave

Buckman

This industrial-comfy shop shows where you can go with a passion for natural coffees and one exemplary breakfast sandwich. The perfect morning here begins with straight brewed coffee, whatever the house is brewing in all its naked, expressive glory. Add the fried egg sandwich, which tucks melted cheddar into a fresh-made toasted sweet bolo roll, then help yourself to hot sauces in the fridge. Push X Pull specializes in coffees that have gone through “natural processing”—the oldest form of coffee production, where heat, gravity, and time are used to naturally remove fruit from bean, yielding sometimes wild, evocative coffees with flavors of blueberry and banana. Look for multiple offerings daily, representing natural style coffees from Uganda, Guatemala, Indonesia, and all parts between. Drink straight brewed coffee here, at least to start, and embrace a style of coffee capable of flavors that may delight and surprise you. Extend the experience with a mole mocha or a crisp Belgian waffle. —KB and JM

821 SE Stark St

Buckman

After years as a beloved wholesale roaster, Roseline opened its cafe in 2019 next to Market of Choice in the Goat Blocks. Along the way, it never lost sight of its strong focus on high-quality coffee, which is consistently nuanced and subtle. At the cafe, mochas made with Cloudforest’s 70 percent dark chocolate are the jumping-off point for more-than-just-coffee drinks; further down the menu is the surprisingly not-too-sweet snickerdoodle latte and another, the Due North latte, is spiced with pink peppercorns. The cafe itself has a tidy, modern feel with intricate tile counters and espresso cups gilded with an enameled rose logo. There’s plenty of seating to hang out for a while and listen to the mellow acoustic tunes while snacking on a fully stocked list of pastries from creative Portland bakery Nuvrei. —MT

1015 SE 11th Ave, Ste 100

Buckman

Caffeinated cotton candy for breakfast? Yes, you want it, if only for the sheer shock and pleasure, not to mention the Instagram video (we’re not judging; go for it). Snow Affogato is the house special at Soro Soro, a Korean coffee shop that doubles as a Museum of Cute, with thousands of miniature knick-knacks for sale. Basically, pour your hot espresso over a giant, sugar-spun cloud, then watch it gurgle, melt, and morph into coffee toffee that infuses the ice cream hidden below. Snow Affogato earned owner Tae Kim and his wife Bobae a following in LA and now in Portland, where lines form for their playful approach. Lattes arrive with stenciled smile-inducing bear art. Syrup flavors are encyclopedic, cherry blossom to taro, and the pastry case pops with adorable animal-themed pastries, rainbow cake in high-def Crayola colors, and one very vegetal matcha tiramisu. Suffice to say, no smiley face or anthropomorphic vegetable is left behind in the back-room gift shop. —KB

2250 E Burnside St

A warm atmosphere and darn good coffee pervades at Sterling.

Image: Michael Novak

Northwest District

Coming here is like rolling downstairs to the kitchen table, a place where everyone and their dogs gather for friendly coffee craft, banter, and neighborhood gossip. Warmth, connection, and dialed drinks with a smile are the law. Anything less would be a near-death experience for Sterling’s Aric Miller, still unwavering in his commitment to create a shop that feels like home, nearly 18 years running. A sweet air of punctilio pervades this lo-fi space—baristas in black shirts, espresso flights with Glencairn whisky glasses, acclaimed Bakeshop pastries, a patch of wallpaper by Victorian textile influencer William Morris. Everything is taken seriously, except seriousness itself. Cappuccinos are a true believer’s experience, and the hot chocolate glows with handmade Ecuadorian chocolate from Portland’s Cloudforest. The lattes say it all. In contrast to shops that worship unadorned black coffee, Sterling’s signature Blendo Stupendo beans are tailored for milk drinks, almost defiant in their accessible notes of chocolate and caramel. They taste like happiness. —KB

518 NW 21st Ave

Tov pours love into every sip.

Image: Isabel Lemus Kristensen

Sunnyside

On the corner of Hawthorne and 32nd sits a bright-red, 50-year-old double-decker bus-turned-cafe. Owner Joe Nazir, who grew up in Cairo, opened the cafe in 2015 after driving the unwieldy bus up from San Diego. On the bus’s first floor, Nazir crafts drinks inside the tiny espresso bar, including finely ground Egyptian coffee with cardamom—brewed by tucking the coffee into a bowl of hot sand. Other standouts: the Mint Thing iced coffee, or a rich double-shot espresso and cinnamon-infused Smells Like the Mall latte. Nazir’s mother bakes all the house pastries, like sweet and syrupy basboosa with semolina flour, coconut shavings, and almonds, to pair with your coffee. Take your drinks upstairs to enjoy on the bus’s oasis-like roof deck, complete with rich red textiles and embroidered pillows hand-carried from Egypt. —ILK

3207 SE Hawthorne Blvd

Upper Left has a food menu to rival its coffee offerings.

Image: Stuart Mullenberg

Ladd's Addition

Upper Left might have the most substantial food menu of any coffee shop in town. It’s filled with snacky brunch dishes like made-to-order croissant sandwiches and lox toasts—best enjoyed on the sprawling patio, when the weather cooperates. The inside is bright and open with terra-cotta pendant lights and coffee roasting equipment visible from the blond wood bar. It’s almost always packed with people working and having meetings. The cafe offers single-origin beans from across South and Central America and Africa, as well as several blends aimed at specific brewing methods with approachable, well-rounded flavor profiles. —MT

1204 SE Clay St