Le Café Alain Ducasse (CLOSED)

Happily, you don’t need to jump on the Eurostar to Paris if you fancy sampling über-chef Alain Ducasse’s exclusive coffee. Simply to take a stroll up to the Coal Drops Yard development near King’s Cross station, where you’ll find this bijou coffee bar nestling under one of the arches. Come here to sample a unique range of quality blends and single-origin coffees from all over the world – all roasted at La Manufacture de café in Paris. Choose from filter, espresso, infusion, capsule or cold brew and enjoy the results as part of a dedicated haute cuisine ceremony in which ‘cafeliers’ take the place of chefs. Drinks – which start at £2.50 for an espresso, rising to £15 for a filter Yemeni coffee – are presented in beautiful bespoke glassware (even the free filtered water is served in a double-walled glass jug). The intense hot chocolate (£5) will give you a taste for the standard of the chocolate here: if you're left craving an extended cocoa fix, you can head next door to Le Chocolat Alain Ducasse, a boutique selling a range of desirable chocolats, all crafted from a workshop in a cobbled Parisian courtyard and available in three large ‘families’: ganaches, truffles and pralines à l’ancienne. </P