If you’ve ever wandered through Eccleston Yards on a Saturday morning -takeaway cup in hand, feeling inexplicably smug about your postcode – you’ll already understand the particular energy of this corner of Belgravia. It’s one of those eclectic London areas that feels both genuinely neighbourhood-y and semi-aspirational: independent boutiques, café terraces, and the kind of crowd that looks effortlessly put-together and comfortably posh.
It’s here – a short stroll away on Eccleston Street – that Workshop Coffee has made its long-awaited return. If you were a regular at their Fitzrovia or Clerkenwell spots before the brand shuttered its café operations in 2024 to focus on wholesale roasting, the reopening feels a bit like bumping into an old friend who’s clearly been on a very good holiday. They look great. They’ve got stories. They’ve learnt things.
Workshop Cafe & Academy, which opened in February this year, occupies the ground and lower-ground floors of an elegant red-brick Victorian building – and this time, they’ve come back with a mission that goes beyond just a good flat white.
Downstairs, an academy offers everything from SCA-accredited barista courses to monthly origin masterclasses, run by Head Barista and Lead Trainer Slava Babych – a former World Cezve Ibrik Champion, no less. This is a brand that takes coffee very, very seriously. The café is just the beautiful front door.
The vibes
Step inside and the space does exactly what great café design should do: it makes you want to stay. The interior is clean and considered – terracotta, Workshop’s signature green, restrained materials, and natural light doing a lot of heavy lifting. It was designed in collaboration with George Cosby Studio and it shows; there’s a refined visual language at work here that stops well short of sterile. Think elegant but cool. The kind of place that makes you want to sit up a little straighter while somehow feeling completely at ease.
The weekend crowd clearly knows its way around a coffee menu – they recognise processing methods and order without hesitation – but the atmosphere isn’t ever exclusionary or self-conscious, partially because the staff will go out of their way to strike a careful balance between knowledge and warmth.
This isn’t anything to admire from a distance: you’re meant to come in, sit down, and get curious, whether that’s chatting with the barista at the counter while they’re making your pour over coffee (there’s time for a quick chat) or just taking a closer look at the coffee on display. Out front, a few tables give you a shot at catching the fleeting (but precious) London sun.
Elegant but cool – the kind of place that makes you want to sit up a little straighter while somehow feeling completely at ease.
What’s on the menu?
The food menu is tight and thoughtful – simple done well, which is more deft than it sounds. We ordered the goat’s cheese focaccia sandwich (£12.50) and avocado toast with poached eggs (£13.75), both arriving in generously sized portions (that heaping mound of creamy, ripe avocado is a bed you’d want to sleep in). Beyond these, the brunch menu covers plenty of ground, ranging from muesli and granola to toasts and salads.
Nothing in the food menu is going to make you dramatically reassess your relationship with brunch. What it will do is make you want to come back every Sunday, reliably, in the way you return to a restaurant not because it blew your mind but because it never, ever lets you down.
The pastries come from St John Bakery, which tells you everything you need to know about the ambition level. On the drinks side: iced lattes and iced matcha (both excellent and beautifully layered – definitely snap-friendly as you can see below), plus some properly good freshly pressed orange juice.
But what you should really order is the pour over coffee. Workshop offers a rotating monthly menu of single-origin filter coffees brewed to order, and it’s the purest expression of what this place is actually about.
The “pour over” is a Japanese manual brewing method that involves pouring hot water over medium-ground coffee in slow, controlled, spiraling motions, following a 30-second “bloom”. Depending on what you order, you’ll get a clean, layered coffee with a lot more flavour than your classic Americano.
Verdict
Workshop Cafe & Academy is a welcome reopening, bringing a splash of brightness and zest to what is already a very trendy area. The food won’t make headlines, but it’s the coffee that’s the star here – and it’s excellent. Add one of the most beautiful interiors in SW1, a neighbourhood setting you’d happily travel from the other side of London for, and a real sense of purpose behind the whole operation, and you’ve got a place that absolutely deserves a weekend visit.
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