Nomad Roasters' Home

This is the speciality coffee shop in Poblenou, where high-end coffee importers and roasters Nomad have installed their headquarters. Part shop, part café and coffee roaster, this is an ideal spot to learn, try and ask. Here they select the beans, toast them and serve them in every way you can imagine, with excellence as a common denominator (note you will not find such horrors as pumpkin flavours and invented sizes served in a litre cup).

Jordi Mestres, who trained as a barista in London, and someone who plays a key role in the world of speciality coffee in Catalonia, explains that when the trend took off, people first worried about setting up beautiful coffee shops dotted with seedlings and sofas; then a big concern was learning how to draw flowers with the milk. Lucky we're now in the third phase, where what's important is having good coffee. Like any speciality café worth its salt, Nomad's decor is the antithesis of feel-good floral and pink flourishes: they are minimalists when it comes to aesthetics, preferring bare wood, steel and glass. 'We teach everything we do,' says Mestres. 'The focus is not on the pictures on the wall, but on how to make and serve coffee. We do only one thing and we aim to do it very well.'