Looking for the best coffee in town, follow the flavor
Being a great lover of coffee and a frequenter of Kyiv coffeehouses, I was happy to finally write about them. The number of places that serve good coffee drinks is limited and throughout the years of my coffee addiction I have visited all of them and gotten to know the assortment and quality of service well enough. However, I’ve decided to reexamine my favorite places, have a closer look at them and finally choose the one that I could justifiably recommend to all the Post’s readers. While performing this task I had to forget all about tea for the past week and spend it drinking coffee. And you know what? I don’t regret it.
The most popular places to try a variety of coffee drinks while having a chat with a friend are Coffee House, Coffee Time, Shokoladnitsa, and other similar places, with fewer locations around the city, like Nescafe, Kofium, Double Coffee, and Kafka. They can be found practically on every corner and offer an almost identical assortment. Coffee drinks there are usually prepared in coffee machines and are accompanied with sweets, pastries, ice cream, and other desserts. The prices are democratic and the spaces are large enough to receive as many visitors as possible. Also, at one of the aforementioned coffeehouses, you’ll most likely be able to choose from smoking or non-smoking rooms. All of these advantages, if combined with good service, which is still a rarity at this kind of place, sound good enough to call such a cafe the best coffeehouse.
Yet there is one more important thing those cafes fail to offer – a correctly brewed and served coffee. The cafes usually offer a lot of coffee drinks, such as espresso, cappuccino, latte, macchiato, frappe and so on, yet all of them are usually brewed from limited blends of Arabica (high quality coffee indigenous to Ethiopia) and Robusta (grown in Africa and Brazil, contains more caffeine then Arabica) types of coffee bean. Moreover, the desired drink at most cafes in Kyiv is usually prepared Italian-style – if you want a small cup of it, you will have to get an espresso. If you inquire about a cup of Turkish coffee, I guarantee that the waiter will give you a very surprised look.
However, coffee fans can still enjoy their favorite drinks at several special places. The first one that offers a large variety of coffee blends is located at Globus. It is a small kiosk studded with small pots containing coffee of various flavors. There you can taste the chosen blend and buy the one that tastes best to you. However, as Globus is constantly crowded with shoppers, it is impossible to properly enjoy coffee drinking. So this kind of place is better for quickly trying and buying the blend you like.
Another place is Dim Kavy, which was originally designed as a shop rather than a cafe. It’s set in a small parlor with a few tables and chairs crammed into it, which are always occupied by patrons. There isn’t any original design to it, yet when I drop in from time to time, I always see fresh flowers in small vases on each table, which I find very sweet. You can order a coffee drink at Dim Kavy from a large list of blends, yet you won’t be able to find anything for a snack.
The largest assortment of coffee blends is offered at Kaffa, located near Maidan Nezalezhnosti. Among the local coffee gourmets, the place is praised as a true coffeehouse that, in addition to serving coffee the right way, easily relaxes and disposes you to a pleasant conversation. I experienced this fully when I stopped by to drink a cup of coffee with cream. The mild music, bitter coffee aroma in the air – without even a hint of cigarette smoke (it is prohibited to smoke at Kaffa, so as not to harm the process of coffee preparation) – and the coffee itself served in a tiny cup, made me forget about my hasty plans for the day. What is more, the coffee is prepared without the help of a coffee machine, and therefore is much more expensive then at usual cafes (Hr 17-23 for a small cup), yet its quality and the comforting ambience of the place without a doubt compensate for the high cost.
Kaffa (3 Shevchenko, 270-6505)
