When you walk down the impossibly busy Berwick Street by the market, darting into the cramped Flat White hardly offers respite thanks to its popularity. But the coffee is so good here that we can accept rarely being able to find a seat straight away. Started by Australian transplants, this Soho café takes its coffee seriously. Selling its own signature Square Mile brew and using it at the base of its in-house drinks, the quality is always high. What should you have? The flat white of course, that antipodean caffeine fix that seems to have been the drink du jour on the London coffee scene for so long now that it’s almost impossible to remember when Londoners couldn’t see beyond the latte. How things have changed thanks to cafés like Flat White.
As well as coffee you can eat in the bustling little café. Breakfasts (served till 4pm) of scrambled eggs, toast and spreads, pastries and porridge are reasonably priced for the location and the community atmosphere the café has going on is almost as addictive as the coffee. An independent on a street filled with them; Soho may be changing but Berwick Street stands strong, powered by Flat White’s caffeine. Always busy, interesting and filled with a changing cast of characters, perhaps this is the type of place John Deakin might have mooched around had he been alive and documenting Soho today. Or perhaps not. Either way, Flat White is a coffee club with much more to admire than the outstanding coffee.
