WAY Specialty Coffee Roasters

Small-batch roasting happens in the same building where the coffee gets poured. WAY Specialty Coffee Roasters works out of an old industrial shell at Dok Noord in Ghent, running a roastery, a café bar, a shelf of brewing gear and a plant-based bakery from one address.

A rotating single-origin list

The coffee is the reason to come. WAY roasts a seasonal single-origin selection that turns over through the year and serves it across espresso, filter, capsules and subscription bags. Recent lots have included Colombia Betulia Papayo, Indonesia Sadayana and Peru Timbuyacu, alongside coffees from Brazil and Ethiopia, so the bar reads as roastery-led rather than as a generic café counter.

Manual brewing sits beside the espresso machine, with V60 the usual route for anyone who wants a single lot brewed rather than pulled, and the lighter coffees come out smooth and tea-like that way. Capsules and a subscription cover the same coffees for people drinking them at home.

The teaching side reinforces the focus. Workshops run through basic espresso training, AeroPress, pour-over, home-barista work on a Sage machine and latte art, which is an unusual amount of instruction for a bar this size and tells you where the attention goes.

Industrial shell, plant-based bakehouse

The room is a casual specialty café rather than a dining room, set in an old industrial building whose raw volume suits Dok Noord's wider conversion of warehouse space. The mix on any given visit is café service, a working micro-roastery, a web shop that sends beans well beyond Belgium, and retail shelves of brewing tools.

Food is bakery-led and entirely plant-based. WAY calls its kitchen a plantaardige bakkerij, a plant-based sourdough bakehouse, and the case runs to pastries, breakfast plates and snacks, with vegan and gluten-free choices throughout. The rhythm is coffee first, then something from the bakery, rather than a full meal.

Start with the flat white

Order the flat white first for the clearest read on the house espresso, then ask what is currently on filter from the roasting programme. A cortado, a double cortado with oat milk, or a V60 all work, and they work best when the bar has a Colombian, Indonesian or Peruvian lot open.

Pair it with the bakery side: a pastry or a breakfast-shaped snack from the plant-based bakehouse. Leave a minute for the retail shelves on the way out, where the beans roasted upstairs sit next to the grinders and drippers to brew them at home.