Above Grnd Coffee

1100 SE Grand Ave, Portland, OR 97214, USA

SPECIALTY

Above Grnd Coffee is a specialty coffee shop located in Portland. Check in here with the Pulled Coffee app to earn real cash rewards. Specialty shops count toward all challenges including Pulled 50, Pulled 100, and Pulled 300.

Above Grnd sits on the second floor of a sneaker store on SE Grand at Belmont, run by first-generation Somali and Muslim immigrants and known as Portland's first Somali-run cafe. The room is airy and spacious with the kind of late-night hours most specialty shops do not keep. The menu is the actual draw: housemade Somali chai with a matcha variation, Arabian recipes in the food program, and a coffee bar that pulls clean espresso alongside. The shop sits above the floor of sneakers, which is a more honest cross-section of Portland than most cafes manage. Late afternoons fill with creatives, sneakerheads who came up to wait out a release, and regulars who treat the room as a third place. Order the Somali chai if you came to taste something you have not tasted before. Order the matcha chai if you want the house specialty in a slightly cooler register.

About Portland

Portland built its specialty register on roasters who never moved off the Eastside. Stumptown Coffee Roasters opened on SE Division in 1999 and set the city template for the decade that followed. Coava Coffee Roasters opened in 2008 in a Matt Higgins garage, then moved into the working roastery and Public Brew Bar at 1015 SE Main, a block off the Hawthorne Bridge. Roseline opened in 2011 on SE 11th across from Kachka, with a second cafe on NE Alberta in Concordia. Water Avenue Coffee runs a downtown shop at 1300 SW 5th and the original flagship across the river on SE Water Avenue with a vintage French Samiac drum roaster.

The neighborhood map covers most of the city. Central Eastside and Buckman hold the working roasteries. Hawthorne, Division, and Sellwood-Brooklyn run the slower neighborhood bars. Alberta and Concordia in Northeast carry the second-wave Eastside cafes. The Pearl District covers the Italian and downtown register through Caffe Umbria on NW 12th, which opened in December 2007. Foster-Powell holds Space Monkey Coffee on the corner of SE 72nd and Foster, anchoring that quadrant since 2004.

Portland is also the city where the multi-roaster bean bar started. Barista on NW 13th opened in 2009 in a Pearl District storefront and ran multiple top roasters on the same bar instead of one house roast. The model spread across the city. The result is a market where most serious cafes pour two or three rotating roasters and the bar conversation rotates with them.