Thursday, 26 November 2009

The Espresso Room WC1 (Bloomsbury Pt. 3)

This place is already on my Central London Coffee Survival Guide Map but it definitely deserves its own blog post.  A hole in the wall in Great Ormond Street, The Espresso Room has a really simple proposition - it makes kick ass coffee.  Given its dinky size, I propose that these guys open branches all around London - in fact they should take over all the existing chain coffee store sites and have an Espresso Room franchise instead, in a 10th of the space.  Londoners would start realising what good coffee tastes like and we could use all that left over shop space to make central London's retail proposition a bit more exciting.  In fact (and I'm really getting carried away now) let's turn all of Zone 1 into an extended version of Lambs Conduit Street, filled with interesting, independent shops - OK, you can keep some of the big department stores like Selfridges and John Lewis (I love John Lewis - particularly the cookware department) but other than Boots the chains have to go (*dream*).  Anyway I digress - this place is great.  Refuel after your lovely retail experience on Lambs Conduit Street - have a flat white for me.

5 comments:

  1. The Espresso Room--like the drink--delivers a lot of flavor in a small volume.

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  2. Loving your blog and especially the Coffee Survival Map, and wanted to pass along a few complementary resources for London and the US:

    Ben (Espresso Room) suggests that "The best places that I know of are:
    * Dose Espresso
    * Tina we salute you
    * Taste of bitter love
    * Climpson and sons
    * Taylor St baristas
    * Gwilym at Present
    * Lantana
    * Flat White
    * Milk Bar
    * Fernandez and Wells
    * Nude Espresso

    To extend the coverage of your map outside of London: when traveling in the U.S., please use these excellent resources/maps for a great cup of espresso:

    * Espresso Map (www.espressomap.com)
    * Pure Coffee Map (http://purecoffee.blogspot.com) that also features a great map (http://coffeeandteaindex.blogspot.com/)

    Thanks to you and these other resources for so generously sharing of their experiences for the benefit of your readers.

    Robert
    Denver, Colorado, USA
    imcellular.org

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  3. Robert - this is great, thanks so much!

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  4. Have you seen www.thecafehunter.co.uk ???

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  5. I had not - thanks for the tip, have added a link on the blog.

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