Ground Up Coffee

Ground Up has bought farm-direct from Cafe Juayua in El Salvador since 2018, and prints the fincas, altitudes and varietals where a customer waiting on a drink can read them. The Juayua family returns the compliment, calling the shop 'our coffee buyer, roasters, and also our friends,' though the bags still carry no roast dates.

They roast in Montebello and stay on single origins (Naranjos and Las Lluvias from El Salvador, San Martin from Guatemala, La Flor from Nicaragua, plus a Kenya), with process, roast profile and tasting notes on each bag and no roast date anywhere.

The bar keeps a short, mostly unchanged menu: espresso at $3.50, a cortado at $4.50, drip of the current single origin, and a cold brew steeped 21 hours in room-temperature water.

A plain Garfield Avenue room with a mural down one wall and a bookshelf stocked for anyone who wants to stay, opening onto a front terrace where most of the seating actually is. Daniel Dupuy and Ryan built it in their own neighbourhood in 2017 and it reads that way rather than designed: wifi, outlets, dogs welcome, patio chairs that make no argument.

• Neighbourhood room
• Wall mural
• Front terrace