Coffee, buns and waffles: Oslo’s café culture

Few cities take coffee as seriously as Oslo, home to world-champion baristas. Add buns, pastries and waffles, and afternoon tea in the grand hotels, and you have a day planned around the café table, with the places in our guide.

Norwegians are among the world’s great coffee drinkers, and Oslo has turned the habit into an art. Its baristas win world titles, and its cafés range from a design shop of the 1960s to doughnut counters on the new waterfront. Pair them with buns, pastries and waffles and you will never be far from your next cup.

The light roast

Start on Grünerløkka. Tim Wendelboe, at Grüners gate 1, is a micro-roastery, coffee training centre and espresso bar run by Tim Wendelboe himself, World Barista Champion and World Cup Tasters Champion. A few streets away, Supreme Roastworks, at Thorvald Meyers gate 18, lives by its motto “no fuss, just great coffee”; its co-owner Odd-Steinar Tøllefsen won the World Brewers Championship in 2015.

In the centre, Fuglen opened as a coffee shop in 1963; by day it serves coffee and tea, by night it becomes a cocktail bar, and everything in the room, chairs and lamps included, is for sale. Stockfleths runs its biggest coffee house over two floors at Prinsens gate 6, and its Lille Grensen café is one of the oldest coffee houses in Oslo.

Buns and pastries

Coffee here comes with something sweet. Boller, soft wheat buns, are everywhere, plain or with raisins or chocolate; the cinnamon bun is one variant, and skolebrød, filled with custard and topped with coconut, another. Åpent Bakeri bakes in its own cafés across the city, on Tjuvholmen among them, and Godt Brød runs bakery workshops around Oslo.

For something more French, Pascal, at Henrik Ibsens gate 36, is famous for its cakes and serves light French lunches too. By the Opera, Talormade makes everything from scratch daily in Bjørvika: try a doughnut, from Boston Cream to salted liquorice, with coffee from its own beans. On a summer day, walk on to Paradis on Tjuvholmen for Italian gelato on the water.

In Oslo the barista may well be a world champion.

Tea in the grand hotels

For an afternoon in style, book tea. Palmen, at the Grand Hotel on Karl Johans gate, serves afternoon tea at weekends, with a livelier “Tipsy Tea” too. In Frogner, To Søstre is the afternoon-tea room of the Sommerro hotel, at Sommerrogata 1.

Waffles in the forest

Then head for the trees. Waffles, topped with brown cheese or with jam and sour cream, are a must in Oslo, and they taste best outdoors. At the end of metro line 5, Sognsvannkiosken bakes pastries every morning and makes waffles and svele to order by the lake. Higher up, Kafé Seterstua at Frognerseteren serves sour-cream porridge, meatballs and its house apple cake, and Tryvannstua is a warming hut beside the Tryvann ski slopes.

Our advice: have your first coffee on Grünerløkka, a bun with the second, and keep the afternoon for tea at the Grand or a waffle in the forest, as Oslo does on a Sunday.