Good Cup · 4 November 2026
Check who is behind the bar, whose coffee is in the grinder and where that coffee was grown. In our data, the people and the roaster separate the best cafés from the rest more clearly than anything else.
Look for a barista with competition results and a roaster the café names. Among the cafés we rate Outstanding, 94 % have someone on the team with a championship title on record. Among Entry Specialty cafés it is 1 %. No other sign we track splits the levels this sharply.
Championship results are public, and they are the closest thing coffee has to a licence. A barista who has placed at a national championship has prepared espresso, milk drinks and a signature drink in front of sensory judges, against the clock. In Prague, the team at Mazelab includes Jackie Tran, who won the World Brewers Cup in 2026. In Warsaw, Błysk Espresso Bar has Michał Ciupiński, Polish Barista Champion in 2025.
A café that cares about its coffee tells you where it comes from. In our data 89 % of Outstanding cafés name their roaster; among Entry Specialty cafés only 38 % do. If the menu, the bags on the shelf or the café's own site never say who roasted the coffee, assume nobody chose it carefully.
Not every good roaster is famous, but the strongest cafés lean on strong ones. 86 % of Outstanding cafés pour a roaster we rate Top or World-class, against 16 % of Entry Specialty cafés. Copenhagen is the clearest case: The Coffee Collective, Prolog, La Cabra and April all roast in the city and run their own bars, and every one of those bars is rated Excellent or Outstanding.
The roaster is half of where the coffee comes from; the farm is the other half. A café that names the farm, the producer, the region and the variety on its menu, its bags and its site can trace every cup back to where it was grown. That takes work: it means buying coffees whose origin is known and keeping track of them as they change through the year. Cafés that do it are telling you they chose the coffee, not just the supplier.
An interior, a queue or a high star rating says little about the coffee. Those are signs of a popular place. Three questions say more: who made this, whose coffee is it, and where was it grown?
Quick check before you go: does the café name its roaster; is that roaster known for quality; does it name the farm or the producer of what it serves; has anyone on the team competed; is there filter coffee as well as espresso. Two or more yeses is a good sign. Our levels do this check for you on every café in a fully analysed city.