This is where I write about specialty coffee and the app.
Why Artisan exists
For years my morning ritual was a Pret coffee on the way to work. Back then it was genuinely good: markedly richer and more flavoursome than Starbucks or Costa. Then the prices crept up and the quality crept down, and one morning it just stopped landing.
A few years later I moved to Croydon and wandered into a small independent café called Crushed Bean. The coffee was the best I’d ever tasted. I haven’t been able to settle since. That gap (between what “coffee near me” returns and what genuinely good coffee actually is) is what Artisan tries to close.
I built it because I kept opening map apps, searching for coffee, and seeing the same three chains plus a petrol-station counter. No specialty filter, no way to tell a place worth walking to from one worth skipping. So I built the app for myself, and since I built it anyway, I put it on the App Store.
What Artisan promises
I won’t tell you exactly how the curation works, but I’ll tell you what the app promises:
- No chains. Starbucks, Costa, Pret, Nero: they can find their own customers. Artisan doesn’t surface them, even when they’re closer.
- No sponsored listings. Nobody pays to appear higher. The cafes you see are the cafes I think are worth the walk, full stop.
- No pay-to-play for “featured” spots. If a place is featured, it’s because it earned it, not because it bought a slot.
- A living map, not a frozen list. This one matters most. The biggest complaint I see about other coffee guides is that they’re out of date: someone made an app, shipped it, and walked away. Artisan isn’t that. When a new cafe opens and proves itself worth visiting, it gets added, so the map reflects what’s genuinely good right now, not what was good in 2023.
- A curator, not an algorithm (even though there’s one in there). The filter is mine. I know what I’m looking for, and I use the app every day to find it.
What’s on this site
The main piece is a guide I wrote on how to find specialty coffee worth walking to: it covers the five signals I use to read a cafe before I order, and what “specialty” and “independent” actually mean. If you’ve ever typed “coffee near me” and felt let down by the results, that’s the one to read.