Number 34 in Europe, 88 in the world

This February we appeared again on The World's 100 Best Coffee Shops: number 34 in Europe, number 88 in the world. It is the second year in a row that the list has included us. Both times the news arrived in the middle of an ordinary week, with a grinder that needed adjusting, a delivery van double-parked on R. dos Sapateiros and a queue that did not care about rankings.

We started in one room in Chiado in May 2022. Six cafés later, spread across the middle of Lisbon, roughly half a million people a year sit down with us, and the six teams hold a 4,8 average across more than 17 800 Google reviews. A place on a list is a pleasant sentence to read. Those reviews, written by people who came back, are the part we actually check.

What it does not change

Not the buying. We taste lots blind before we know what they cost or who is selling them, and we buy what is sweet, clean and stable in the cup two weeks after roasting rather than what is fashionable in a competition. Recognition creates a quiet pressure to reach for the loudest, most experimental lots on offer, because those are the ones people write about. We have tried a few. Most of them are exhausting to drink twice.

Not the roasting either. We roast weekly at our own roastery in Lisbon, we lock each profile and we recalibrate it monthly against a reference roast. A locked profile is unglamorous work: it means the espresso a guest drinks in Belém in the third week of the month should taste like the one they drank in Alfama in the first. Consistency is harder than novelty, and nobody puts it on a list. And not the room. Our brand line is <span class="it">slow moments in a fast city</span>, and the test of it has nothing to do with coffee scores. It is whether someone can sit for forty minutes with a filter and a book on a Wednesday, in a city that fills up more every year, and be left alone in a friendly way.

What it does change

• Access. Producers and importers return our emails faster, which means we get offered samples earlier in the season and can commit to lots we would previously have heard about too late.
• Wholesale. More kitchens and hotels in Lisbon call us first, and a weekly roast schedule with a locked profile is easier to explain to a head chef than it used to be.
• Hiring. People now apply to us rather than the other way round, so we can train slowly instead of filling a rota.
• Scrutiny. A bad cup is no longer just a bad cup; someone travelled for it. That is fair, and we would rather have it than not.

A list can send someone through the door once. What they drink decides whether they come back on a Tuesday.

So the credit goes where it belongs. To the people who queue in Sé at nine, who bring visiting family to Santos, who work all morning from Blue Street on one flat white and apologise for it. And to the six teams who dial in twice a day, in six rooms with six different water pressures and six different door draughts, on the same Victoria Arduino machines, and keep the coffee boring in the best sense of the word.

Second year on the list, second year with the same plan: buy carefully, roast weekly, serve the same coffee tomorrow.