Why go
Two competitors at the counter
The flight lands as three cups, espresso, macchiato and filter. Emi Fukahori, Co-Founder of MAME in Zürich, built that kind of comparison into a café where the bar is also a bench. Mathieu Theis, Co-Founder and Competition Barista, works the same house from the green-coffee side, selecting coffees, roasting them and keeping the program close to competition practice. Fukahori, Japan-born and Zurich-based, co-founded MAME in 2016 to make a community around specialty coffee; her own record includes the 2018 World Brewers Cup title and multiple Swiss Barista Championship wins. Theis, France-born and Zurich-based, co-founded the business in the same year, won the Swiss Barista Championship in 2016, 2018, 2019, 2024 and 2026, and has repeatedly reached World Barista Championship finals. Their lineage here is not a single master and apprentice story. It is the discipline of the competition table brought back to counter service, with tasting, extraction and hospitality treated as one method. MAME means beans in Japanese, and the name suits the scale of the obsession without making it theatrical.
Flights, microlots and the roast
The coffee program at MAME Josef keeps two lanes in view: competition coffees chosen by Fukahori and Theis for the top end of the bar, and daily coffees roasted for espresso or filter. Since 2020, MAME has sourced and roasted its own coffees, which gives the café a shorter line between green selection, roast development and the drink handed over the counter. The menu reaches from espresso and flat white to filter coffee and the coffee flight, a structure that asks the guest to taste one coffee through different weights of milk, pressure and brew method. During one documented service, Daniele Ricci brewed with a Goat Story Gina brewer and poured coffees including a natural-processed Ethiopia from Garse, Auromar from Panama and Pearl from Brazil. Retail releases have included uba is back, La Negrita Sidra and Pink bourbon. The house speaks in varietals, processing and cup memory, but the method stays practical: grind, dose, brew, taste, correct.
The room near Josefwiese
At Josefstrasse 160, in the Josefwiese neighbourhood, the room reads more as a working coffee bar than as a designed stage. Counter service keeps the pass visible. On a quieter weekday, the barista has time to talk through a brew and let the tasting unfold; on a packed weekend, three baristas can move drink after drink across the counter without turning the room into theatre. The mood is humble, conversational and specialty-focused, with the coffee doing most of the instruction. The branch has been described as more functional than polished in its interior, but that almost clarifies the place. The hands are on the grinder, the brewer and the cup.
A Swiss group with a competition spine
MAME now runs as a Swiss specialty coffee group with 6 locations, but MAME Josef still carries the feeling of a station where the founders’ habits set the tone. Theis keeps returning to competition, and Fukahori continues as a brewer, barista and coach, so the café’s progress is measured less by décor than by what reaches the cup. MAME Josef serves espresso, macchiato and filter.
