The Best Coffee Shops In Strasbourg

France’s ninth biggest city has come a long way since we first visited in 2016. Back then, we resigned ourselves to drinking little cups of over-roasted commodity coffee at Strasbourg cafes. On the upside, many of those cafes also sold delightful French pastries. Although Café Bretelles opened before our first visit, it never appeared on our coffee radar. Quel dommage!

Times have changed. Fast forward to the present and Strasbourg doesn’t just have one specialty coffee shop. It has several and they’re easier to find now if you know where to look. We found and visited several during our caffein-fueled return visit. We even took an ill-fated walk through the city’s industrial district to visit a roaster but that’s a different story.

Discover our favorite Strasbourg restaurants and our favorite Strasbourg bars.

Our Favorite Strasbourg Coffee Shops

L’Escabeau d’Omnino

Everybody has to start somewhere. While we started our multi-day Strasbourg coffee crawl at L’Escabeau d’Omnino, a trio of coffee enthusiasts started Strasbourg’s Omnino coffee operation in a 1972 Citroën van back in 2017. Within a year, they opened their first cafe inside a former flower shop and haven’t looked back since.

We sat outside while we drank flat whites crafted with washed Panche Siquila coffee beans from Colombia during our visit. Other options ‘of the moment’ included cold brew coffee brewed with Colombian geisha beans and filtered coffee brewed with Kenyan beans.

Not only did these flat whites fuel us for a day of food tripping, but they also motivated us to try the cafe’s cold brew. However, we saved that experience for another day at another Omnino location. Yes, Omnino has expanded to include multiple cafes in Strasbourg and Mulhouse.

Café Bretelles

Open since 2014, Café Bretelles isn’t just one of Strasbourg’s best specialty coffee shops. It’s also the city’s original specialty coffee shop. We’re not sure how we missed the original Krutenau cafe in 2016 – apparently we needed a guide like the one we’re producing here.

Though we’ve changed over the years, Café Bretelles has remained true to its original model of serving specialty coffee with a nod toward sustainability. The cafe continues to source its global beans from France’s Mokxa. It also sources many of its food products from local farms and producers.

One thing that has changed is that Café Bretelles now has a second location in Strasbourg’s Petite France neighborhood. This is the location where we drank two drinks – a text book flat white and filtered coffee brewed with Ethiopian beans.

Needing a break from the city’s maddening Christmas crowds, we snagged one of seven upstairs tables and caught up on emails during our visit. Next time, we may bring our laptops and we’re definitely ordering a homemade Twix bar. Not ordering that chocolate caramel bar is our sole regret regarding Café Bretelles but it’s one that we can easily rectify.

Coffee Stub

Located on the edge of the Ill River, Coffee Stub is the Strasbourg coffee shop that most reminded us of coffee shops we’ve visited in Berlin, Copenhagen and Hamburg. Natch, the Coffee Stub serves great coffee but that wasn’t the only reason…

For starters, the tiny shop has a global vibe and decor that reminded us more of Scandinavia than Alsace. Next was the coffee made with beans roasted by Berlin’s Five Elephant. Finally, the beanie-topped barista (Fred) had a passion that reminded us of German hipsters we’ve encountered during our travels.

Coffee Stub features a different specialty roaster each month. During our visit, that roaster was the aforementioned Five Elephant. The independent coffee shop also started roasted Brazilian beans during the pandemic.

Oh My Goodness Café

Oh My Goodness Café looks like a typical specialty coffee shop with its sleek bar, cosy furniture and colorful mugs. Seriously, we’ve seen these same mugs at coffee shops on four different continents. But the story behind this two-story cafe may make you say “OMG.”

Unlike most coffee shops which are commercial businesses, Oh My Goodness Café operates as ‘associative’ cafe with both employees and volunteers. In addition to serving great coffee, its missions include supporting homeless people, encouraging people to ‘pay forward’ cups of coffee, building community through board game nights and educating during language workshops.

Not knowing about Oh My Goodness Café’s multiple missions prior to our visit, we focused on ordering and drinking flat whites crafted with Ethiopian beans roasted by Renart in nearby Hohengoeft, approximately 30 kilometers northwest of Strasbourg.

But wait, there’s more. Oh My Goodness Café has a food menu to go with its coffee menu. Sweet options include pastries, cakes and cookies. Hungrier customers can order breakfast or lunch depending on the time of day.

Le Kiosque d’Omnino

L’Escabeau d’Omnino may have been the first Omnino cafe but it’s not Omnino’s most interesting cafe. That honor goes to Le Kiosque d’Omnino.

As its name suggests, Le Kiosque d’Omnino is located inside a kiosk but not just any kiosk. This kiosk, desiged by Jean-Luc Vilmouth and located in the Place Saint-Pierre-le-Vieu, is shaped like a birdcage.

The tiny kiosk impressed us with its full slate of coffee offerings that included flat whites, cappuccinos and filtered coffee. However, we didn’t order any of those drinks. We instead chose to sip cold brews made with the micro-roastery’s championship beans.

As the barista explained to us, Omnino refrigerates its cold brew for 24 hours and filters it a few times before it’s ready to serve. However, we didn’t need an explanation to appreciate the cold brew’s sweet and delicate flavors. That we figured out on our own.

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Original Publication Date: April 30, 2022