Bob Coffee Lab

Two round windows in the left-hand wall look straight into the roastery, and they open, so on a good day the room smells of whatever is in the drum. Bob Coffee Lab keeps three tables, the door usually propped, and the bar close enough to the roasting to make the two feel like one operation.

A roastery with a coffee bar attached

The Lab is where the brand started, in the summer of 2017, when the smell of a Geisha roasting filled the garage of an interwar villa in northern Bucharest. It has grown into a coffee shop and roastery on a corner just outside King Mihai I Park, on a boulevard busy with families and weekend traffic, with two further Bob shops elsewhere in the city.

The roasting is the point rather than the backdrop. Green coffee comes from origins including Panama and Indonesia, profiles are built in house, and the bags on the shelf are the same coffees being poured at the bar. The World's 100 Best Coffee Shops placed Bob Coffee Lab at number 46 in 2025.

Three tables and a wall of figurines

The scale is deliberate. Three tables means most people stand, lean or take it away, and it keeps customers within talking distance of whoever is on the bar. The shelves and desks are packed with film and anime figures, Freddy Krueger, Leatherface and Predator among them, which gives the room a personality that a minimal specialty fit-out would not.

The roastery windows are the other reason it works. They are low enough to interest children, close enough that you can watch a batch drop, and opened when the team wants to let the smell out. The brand says it keeps changing the room visually rather than settling into a fixed cafe formula.

What to ask for

Ask what is on the bar and how they would rather you drink it. The house brews across ibrik, moka pot and espresso, and treats coffee cocktails as fair game, so the answer changes with the coffee rather than defaulting to a flat white.

Then buy a bag. Retail is not a sideline here; the roastery's beans are the reason for the whole layout, and the counter is used to explaining which profile suits which brewer. If coffee is not what you came for, lemonade and cakes fill in, but they are supporting cast.