Café Leon Dore

Two iced coffees explain this counter. Freddo espresso is chilled espresso poured hard over ice; freddo cappuccino is the same base under a thick, cold milk foam, and between them they carry the Greek café habit the New York original built its name on. Café Leon Dore sits on the ground floor of Aimé Leon Dore’s Soho flagship in London, where the brand’s family heritage, Leon and Dore, gets expressed in coffee and pastry rather than in clothing.

Greek-influenced coffee and the freddo habit

The beans come from Loumidis, a Greek roaster, which is what keeps the freddo from tasting like a generic iced latte. Cinnamon, cocoa or honey can finish the drink, but the defining contrast is strong coffee against cold foam.

The rest of the list is deliberately short: coffee, tea, hot chocolate, cold brew, Greek Mountain Tea made from sideritis, and bottled soft drinks including Three Cents pink grapefruit, Amita peach, San Pellegrino and Coca-Cola. There is no wine or cocktail layer at all, so the identity stays daytime, zero-proof and coffee-led.

A smart-casual café inside a fashion flagship

The setting matters as much as the menu. Walnut panelling, marble floors and art deco shelving lined with objects and artefacts give the room its weight, and a corner terrace under a green awning with the brand’s sine-wave trim puts a handful of seats out into the Soho street. Inside, a Tuscan and Parisian café-chic mood is filtered through a streetwear sensibility.

The rhythm is simple: come in off a busy street, order coffee and something sweet, then sit inside or outside among shoppers, locals, tourists and people who came for the clothes. It follows the New York blueprint of retail, coffee, pastry and lingering in one space, which is a different proposition from a shop that happens to sell coffee.

Order the freddo cappuccino and kourabiedes

Start with the freddo cappuccino for the drink the café is built around, or the freddo espresso if you want it sharper and colder. Greek Mountain Tea is the other distinctive order, a caffeine-free herbal infusion from sideritis, also called ironwort, and it works as the calm alternative to a second espresso.

The food is concise and pastry-led. Croissants cover the French side, plain, chocolate or almond, the almond one filled with almond paste and dusted with powdered sugar. The Greek cookies are the culturally specific order: kourabiedes, buttery almond cookies under powdered sugar; melomakarona, honey-soaked walnut cookies; and koulourakia, buttery vanilla cookies. Greek chocolates, wafers, honey and chamomile tea sit on the retail shelf for taking home. The pairings are obvious once you are in: freddo cappuccino with a croissant, freddo espresso with kourabiedes, or Greek Mountain Tea with a honeyed melomakarona.