One of London’s Best Coffee Shops Will Grow Again in the City

One of London’s best coffee shops, Rosslyn, will open a third site in the City at the end of March. It will open a new cafe at Tower 42, taking over a former takeaway unit for French group Paul, adding to the original on Queen Victoria Street and the second on London Wall, which opened just last November.

Set to open around 28 March, in time for the 2022 London Coffee Festival, it’s co-founders James Hennebry and Mat Russell’s largest yet. But the basic principles of a Rosslyn: standing room only; in-and-out doors for flow; a QR code menu of rare coffees that can run up to £10 or £12 a cup ballasted by pride in the flat whites, long blacks, and lattes that are the core of any successful cafe’s sales.

Hennebry says that while the price is a curve for some customers, savvy marketing — and building up trust with regular, regular coffee drinkers — means it’s easier than many hyperbolic column inches might suggest to convey why a coffee might cost that much.

It’s also the right time to open a cafe that has been in the works for over two years. Not just because the business impact of COVID-19 is receding, but because its two existing cafes have decisively returned to some kind of “normal.” While sales remain down on pre-pandemic levels, the London Wall cafe took just a month to hit 1,000-plus coffees a day, a feat that took the original Queen Victoria Street site a year.

When Rosslyn entered this website’s London’s best coffee shops guide, this writer wrote that it might represent “a template for the next stage of speciality coffee in London.” So far, it’s more than delivering on that promise.

More soon.