Five specialty coffee places
worth crossing Lisbon for

Of The Folks' six Lisbon locations, Santos is the one people come back for. The interior is a statement — suspended pillow-like forms overhead, a space that feels more curated installation than café — and then the tram rolls past the window and reminds you exactly where you are.

Founded in 2022, The Folks reached the world's top 100 coffee shops by 2025 and held the spot into 2026, ranking 88th globally. The team has launched their own Abraço coffee line, roasting Costa Rica microlots in Lisbon, and the bar takes extraction as seriously as the interior takes aesthetics. Not a great spot to work — the vibe leans lingering, not heads-down — but for a slow mid-morning espresso or a brunch with something worth photographing, Santos delivers consistently.

Walk five minutes from The Folks Santos and you find Buna — smaller, quieter, and built around a completely different logic. The focus here is on the rotation. Guest roasters cycle through regularly, including names like Manhattan Coffee Roasters and Drop, and the baristas typically run two distinct espresso styles alongside a filter option.

Small tables, sharp lighting, and an atmosphere of genuine concentration make it a favourite among Lisbon locals who treat coffee as a daily practice. If you want to benchmark your palate against what European specialty roasters are producing right now, Buna is the most honest place in Santos to do it.

The name refers to the optimal brewing temperature — and 94° means it literally. Founded by Illia Akulov and Taras Tunskyy, this is a specialty coffee brand and roastery with a bold, minimalist design sensibility that feels closer to New York than Lisbon. Beans come from championship-winning producers — Nestor Lasso, Rodrigo Sanchez, Sebastian Ramirez — sourced with a specificity that signals genuine intent.

Pastries are baked in-house daily by the owner, the ceremonial matcha is sourced from Uji in Japan, and the café recently ranked among the top five independent specialty shops in the city. For the Koffeesome crowd — people who want to know exactly what they're drinking and where it came from — the level of provenance detail on offer here is rare in Lisbon.

Solo Brewing began in 2021 in Recife, Brazil. Founder Adroaldo brought the roastery to Lisbon's Saldanha neighbourhood in 2023, and the results were immediate — at Porto Coffee Week, Solo won the Coffee Market Awards for Best Coffee Roaster in Portugal 2025, taking both the expert jury prize and the fan vote simultaneously.

The approach is personal — baristas will guide you through a taste perception exercise when you order something interesting, and the owner is genuinely around. The cold brew has developed a following for its unusual fruity, grape-like character. Brazilian-inflected food options round out a visit that manages to feel both educational and deeply relaxed. In a city where new cafés open constantly, Solo has already built the kind of loyalty that takes years to earn.

Where The Folks started. The Baixa-Chiado address is the original home — a cosy corner café where the brand's love for coffee and community took root — and it carries a slightly different energy to the showier Santos location. The room is smaller, the pace a little faster, and the foot traffic more mixed, but the coffee programme is identical: the same Abraço microlot espresso, the same attention to the bar.

For a visitor moving through central Lisbon, this is the easiest entry point into The Folks universe. For someone who already knows Santos, it's an interesting comparison — same beans, same philosophy, completely different feeling. The Chiado branch handles both the neighbourhood local and the city-centre address roles with ease.