MAME

Competition coffees and daily roasts

The menu splits in two and that split explains the bar. MAME divides its coffee into competition lots, chosen for how expressive they are, and daily coffees roasted for espresso or filter at home and in restaurants. The name means beans in Japanese, a reference the founders tie to craft and continuous improvement. Emi Fukahori and Mathieu Theis started the business in 2016 and began sourcing and roasting their own coffee in 2020; both are multiple Swiss barista champions, Emi won the World Brewers Cup in 2018, and Mathieu has been a World Barista finalist. The daily coffees are the ones that end up in home grinders and on shop shelves, while the competition lots are selected by the founders for what they can do in a cup. Named releases include uba is back, La Negrita Sidra and a Pink bourbon the roastery compares to peach iced tea. It was named in the European Coffee Trip Awards in 2025.

The Josefwiese bar

The Zurich venue is MAME Josef, in the Josefwiese neighbourhood, where the city is at its most inclined to linger outdoors in summer. The room itself is not the argument: the interior looks somewhat dated and the coffee is unambiguously the reason to be there. Service changes with the day. On a quiet weekday morning a barista has time to talk and walk you through a tasting; on a busy Sunday three of them work the bar without pause, turning out one drink after another. Expect a bar focused specialty shop, conversational when calm and high throughput when full, and plan the visit accordingly if a guided tasting is what you want.

Start with the flight

The coffee flight is the clearest first order because it shows the roastery across formats at once: espresso, macchiato and filter, covering concentration, milk texture and brewed clarity in a single sitting. From there a filter brewed on a Goat Story Gina leads into single origin and microlot territory, which is where the competition lots make their case. Specific cups have included a natural processed Ethiopia from Garse, an Auromar from Panama and a Pearl from Brazil. The classics hold up the rest of the list, with cappuccino, espresso, macchiato and filter all available on their own. There is no food programme to speak of. The draw is the coffee and the comparison.