Why go
Light roast under Einar Kleppe Holthe
The roast is kept light, the coffee served across the counter, and Einar Kleppe Holthe is founder and global director at Fuglen Coffee Roasters in Oslo. His station is not a single bench so much as a program: green coffee, roasting, service, education, and the café rhythm that carries Fuglen from morning cups into evening drinks. Holthe became Norwegian Barista Champion in 2007, then bought the former Kaffefuglen in 2008 and built Fuglen around a Nordic light-roast approach, direct trade, and the idea that a coffee house could hold more than one tempo without losing its discipline.
That older name matters here. Fuglen traces its Oslo coffee life to 1963, but the Gamlebyen roastery and espresso bar gives the program a working address in the old town, at St. Halvards gate 33. The broader Fuglen model later reached Tokyo in 2012, then developed its own roasting arm. In Oslo, Holthe’s hand is visible in the structure rather than in theatre: the café by day, bar by night pattern; the attention to roast clarity; the insistence that coffee, design, music, and a room for lingering can belong to the same house.
A roastery built around tasting
The coffee program here is stated plainly: lightly roasted coffee, direct trade principles, a roastery and espresso bar, with beans moving beyond the counter through retail, subscription, and wholesale. Fuglen’s own ecosystem around the Gamlebyen site includes brewing guides, coffee subscription, coffees of the month, cupping, and a brewing course, so the place reads less like a shop with bags on a shelf and more like a teaching room attached to production.
The house does not name every brew method, origin, or piece of bar equipment in public. What it does put forward is a method of attention: tasting as practice, roast as identity, and service as part of the same chain as sourcing. Tea sits in the retail orbit, and the room also carries a cocktail bar identity, but coffee remains the grammar. The work is in keeping the cup clear enough that roast does not become weight, and structured enough that a casual order at the counter still belongs to the same program as a cupping table.
Gamlebyen with coffee and jazz
In the room, the old-town setting does not turn the café into a relic. Fuglen Coffee Roasters works as a social place, modern in its design language, with enough ease for reading, laptop work, conversation, and a longer stay over coffee. The counter carries the daytime discipline; the bar changes the register after the coffee rush. Live jazz and other events give the room a second pulse without making it feel staged.
That shift suits Gamlebyen. The venue is a roastery, coffee bar, and cocktail bar at once, and the combination could feel scattered in lesser hands. Here it depends on sequence. Coffee first establishes the standard, then the room opens outward, toward records, glasses, dogs at the feet of regulars, and the low movement of people staying past the first cup.
The line Holthe keeps drawing
Fuglen’s expansion into Asia could easily become the whole story, but the Oslo roastery keeps the attention close to the hand. Holthe’s work at Fuglen Coffee Roasters is to make the system legible without flattening it: sourcing, roasting, tasting, serving, and gathering under one roof. Lightly roasted coffee at St. Halvards gate 33.
