Why go
House coffee at the counter
The degustación sets three cups on the counter: espresso, cortado, and a mini batch brew. Pablo Caballero and Nolo Botana, co-founders of Hola Coffee Lagasca in Madrid, have built the Lagasca address around that kind of close reading, where the same coffee can be tasted through pressure, milk, and filter in one sitting. Caballero is a Spanish barista champion, and Botana is his partner in the company behind the café and roastery; together they have led Hola Coffee since 2016. The Lagasca branch belongs to that wider Madrid program, but it is not interchangeable with the other addresses. It is the Barrio de Salamanca café at Lagasca 42, a small, street-level room where the roaster’s own coffee meets a neighborhood counter. The lineage here is not presented through a named master or inherited house style. It sits in the discipline of a barista-led company that roasts independently in Madrid, then serves the work without making the room feel like a laboratory.
A flight, a Modbar, and seasonal signatures
The coffee program is the reason the place holds. Hola Coffee roasts its own coffee in Madrid and brings that roasting language into Lagasca through classic espresso service, filter coffee, batch brew, and seasonal signature drinks. The café has an espresso and brew bar, with a Modbar espresso machine visible at the front, so the method does not disappear behind a wall. A guest can stay with a short espresso, move to a cortado, or take the flight as a way of measuring texture, sweetness, and dilution across formats. The wider roastery sells blends, decaf, half-caf, cold brew, and single-origin coffees from Brazil, Tanzania, Kenya, Colombia, Peru, Rwanda, and Mexico, though the café does not state that every coffee appears at Lagasca on a given day. Food supports the cup rather than overtakes it: freshly made artisan pastries, toast, sandwiches, and dishes prepared from the small kitchen behind the bar.
Colour, flowers, and the rear room
The room is compact and more layered than it first appears from the street. The counter comes early, with the espresso and brew bar setting the pace; behind it, the kitchen works quietly, and farther back the seating opens into a larger area for laptops, small gatherings, and longer coffee. The official description gives the capacity as around 49 people, which explains the feel of the place: small enough for the pass to stay in view, large enough to let a cup last. Minimalist lines carry most of the design, then colour and flowers soften the edges. It is a quiet café, functional without being bare, suited to watching the neighborhood move past the glass while the barista keeps the station.
The branch with a ranking attached
In 2025, Hola Coffee Lagasca ranked 12th in The World’s 100 Best Coffee Shops, recognition attached to this Barrio de Salamanca branch rather than to the brand in general. The room seems to bend around that number. Caballero and Botana keep the work at counter height: roasted coffee, a visible brew bar, a short food program, and seasonal drinks that change the reason to return to Lagasca 42.
