Jeremy Challender and Gwilym Davies do not, as a general rule, wear £200 jeans but they seem to like pulling espressos in shops that sell them. The baristas behind Prufrock Coffee have parked an espresso machine just inside the shop window of Woodhouse, a designer menswear boutique at 189 Westbourne Grove in Notting Hill, West London (see map).  Their other in-store espresso bar is in East London at the Shoreditch designer menswear boutique Present.

Challender, who for now is resident barista-in-the-Woodhouse, is using a seasonal blend from Square Mile Coffee Roasters for his espressos but may switch to a single origin espresso, as he and Davies have already done at Present. Only at Woodhouse is he preparing sublime lattes with Daylesford Organic whole milk poured from biodegradable bag packs. Very neat.

This isn’t a stand-alone, full-time coffee shop, but for (great) coffee-deprived West London it’s a start: The Prufrock espresso bar at Woodhouse is open Thursday, Friday & Saturday 10:30am-5pm; Sunday noon-4:30pm. By an amazing coincidence these are the exact times I told the Woodhouse store manager I would be available to work when, only this morning, I submitted my application for the position of sales assistant.

The London cafenatic’s Tour de France is a kilometre long, with no hills or turns from start to finish. It departs from look mum no hands, a garagehouse coffee shop at 49 Old St, and arrives at Rapha Cycle Club, a pop-up gallery, boutique and coffee bar at 146-148 Clerkenwell Rd.

View london cafenatic’s tour de france in a larger mapBoth cafés are screening each stage of the Tour de France from start to finish, with free parking for bikes.

Open for the summer only and not-to-be-missed by coffee, cycle and design geeks alike, Rapha Cycle Club is a modern showroom dominated by a long communal reading table and a gray Citroen voiture balai – the broom wagon that would follow riders up the steepest descents of the Tour de France and sweep up those who dropped off along the way.

To the right is a boutique displaying books and Rapha cycling gear as stylish as it is pricey. Behind it is a coffee bar with Matt from Nude Espresso pulling shots of a full-bodied custom blend roasted by Nude . Downstairs is an exhibition space with vintage racing bikes and jerseys celebrating the centenary of the Col du Tourmalet, one of the most famous climbs of the Tour de France.

look mum no hands is here for the long haul and how fortunate for us that it is. Inside and out this is one of the most spacious, relaxed and coolest coffeehouses around. It’s so easygoing and the coffee, from the London roaster Square Mile, so good you’ll be tempted to claim a regular spot for yourself and order business cards listing 49 Old Street as your office address.

UPDATE: Penny University to pop down 30 July.

If you want to see a Londoner famous for his temperature control get a little hot and bothered, just tell James Hoffmann in the most noncommittal tone you can muster you thought one of his featured brews from Square Mile Coffee Roasters was “fine” or “okay”. Better still, tell the 2007 World Barista Champion that, upon reflection, you suppose his coffee shop in London’s Shoreditch, Penny University, “fills a hole”.

“Ambivalence,” says Hoffmann, “is a terrible thing”.

Conversely, saying you positively hate his prized Blackburn Estate coffee from Tanzania is likelier than not to make him smile and get his attention. A puritanical shrine to brewed coffee that deprives its would-be disciples of espresso, milk and sugar, Penny University is meant to provoke. And so Hoffmann will take a “definitely hate” over a “sort of like” any day, even if devotion and love are the rightful responses to this groundbreaking, unplugged, pop-up coffee shop.

Make no mistake, Penny U is a retail space built to showcase and sell coffees, Square Mile coffees to be precise. Fearing some might wrongly judge the quality of the coffees according to the expense of machinery used to brew them, equipment most can’t use at home, Hoffmann and his associate Tim Styles (above left), who runs the shop he helped design, have taken the low-tech route. They’ve eschewed £10,000 brewers in favour of three manual home brewers made by the Japanese glassware company Hario: the V60 paper-filtered pour-over, the TCA-Syphon (vacpot) and the woodneck cloth-filtered pour-over drip pot.

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By providing even water temperature and distribution for the proper measure of coffee grinds, these filter brewers help a barista produce a cup of great clarity and often sweetness that unmuddies the taster’s experience. For me, it’s easier to pick up the aroma and taste of hazelnuts in the Capao Chapada Diamantina from Brazil or red berry nuances in the Blackburn Estate than it would be in an espresso. You almost want to ask Hoffmann where he sourced the hazelnuts and strawberries, which is just the sort of naïve and deceptively simpleminded question he and Penny U baristas Styles and Tobias Cockerill crave.

Everything in the cup, notes Hoffmann, is “from the roasted seeds of coffee cherries. The spectrum of flavours when they’re ground and dissolved in hot water is unbelievable.”

I’m not giving up espresso and neither is Hoffmann.  But there’s no denying that as presented at Penny U the slow quiet of the pour-over and siphon brewing processes constitutes a spiritual retreat from the humming, hissing and clickety-clack of the typically frenetic espresso bar. Seated at the six-stool counter you find yourself possessing both the time and the inclination to ask Tim or Tobias about the coffee they’re methodically brewing for you. The baristas may be answering you but they’re talking to everyone in the shop. Soon you are exchanging thoughts with neighbours to your right and left. Conversation starts with coffee but strays easily away from it. That’s the coffeehouse experience.

You don’t need to spend much time studying Penny U to notice contradictions within its dogma. The coffee is said to be about the ingredient, not the brewer, yet the Hario coffee makers, on sale in the shop, are very nearly objects of worship. The results are said to be attainable at home, yet the care and precision of the accomplished baristas seems paramount – and irreplaceable. It’s a big part of the experience. Furthermore, the no-sugar policy is a great conceit. I rarely drink my coffee with sugar. I understand their wanting and even urging us to discover the character and natural sweetness of their coffees apart from – and uninfluenced by – the flavour of the sugar and, yes, the milk. But isn’t sugar dosage a coffee drinker’s prerogative? Shouldn’t he or she get to decide if a coffee roasted by Square Mile tastes better or worse with sugar ?

Hoffmann has good answers for these challenges and you may have a few of your own. Indeed you can’t very well have a “penny university”, as the estimated 400-500 coffeehouses of 17^th century London were known, without the certainty of a good debate. These haunts were so-nicknamed for the price of a coffee and the education that went with it.

An anonymous verse from that period went:

So great a Universitie, I think there ne’er was any

In which you may a Scholar be, for spending a penny

Penny University – 5 Redchurch Street, London EC 7DJ

Ben Townsend, the British owner/operator of The Espresso Room, may not be an accredited pharmacist, but he fastidiously pulls every shot of espresso as if it were lifesaving. He’s proof you don’t need to have Antipodean ancestry to be an unflappably affable London barista. (We’ll simply ignore the fact that he spent 8 years in Melbourne, acquiring Australian citizenship – and possibly a sunny disposition – along the way.) His good-natured perfectionism has turned this narrow slice of Bloomsbury into one of the top 10 coffee shops in London.

31-35 Great Ormond Street, London, WC1 (see map)

The first Spianata & Co rolled out in 2004, so it is something of a stretch to term this Italian sandwich shop a discovery. Yet the thousands of City suits who walk by it every day, oblivious to its very existence, can make it seem like an esoteric find.

This pizza bianca is not the tomato-less “white pizza” featured at pizzerias but is instead the near-naked raft of classic flat bread from Rome. It’s one of the world’s great chews. Forget cheese: the only toppings are scant olive oil, salt and rosemary. Spianata’s version may not compare to Rome’s best –  Antico Forno Roscioli, Forno Campo de’ Fiori – but its golden, bronze-highlighted color looks right and its crisp-crusted air pockets and low density allow for chewy compression. My lone frustrations: that it’s baked with no rosemary to speak of and mostly in advance. If you want it warm, as you should, you usually have to ask for a reheat, which hardens the bread and doesn’t do it justice.

Spianata also prepares pizza rossa romana, which, as you’ve guessed, is painted with a coat of tomato sauce. It’s thinner and crisper than the bianca and altogether fabulous. Incredibly it’s only £1.60 cold, £1.85 reheated (due to VAT). I’ve otherwise tried and liked 3 toasted sandwiches assembled with pizza bianca, including the delightful Nutella breakfast panino, but won’t explore any further. From now on it’s either the bianca or the rossa for me. If I want a sandwich I’ll get 2 rossi and stick them together.

Spianiata has good espresso and cappuccino prepared with illy’s arabica blend. The illy red sign is hardly a reliable indicator of quality preparation, but here they have Italians who care about coffee on both sides of the counter and the results are positive. Spianiata didn’t make my list of top 10 coffee shops in London, nor did it qualify for my top 10 London pizzerias (which rated only Margheritas). Still, when stuck within the walls of London’s Square Mile, why not follow the Roman way?

Click here to view map

73A Watling Street, London EC4
41 Brushfield Street, London E1
20 Holborn Viaduct, London EC1
12 Moorfields, London EC2
29/30 Leadenhall Market, London EC3