Kiss Coffee

3016 Northeast Ainsworth Street

SPECIALTY

Kiss 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.

Kiss Coffee sits at 3016 NE Ainsworth, between 30th and 31st, in the Concordia neighborhood. The cafe is small, Black-owned, and built around a from-scratch kitchen, with breakfast and lunch running all day on the menu. Eggs come cooked to order. Pastries are baked in-house. The syrups for the bar are made on site, which is rare. Coffee pours on Seven Virtues and Nossa Famila, two Portland roasters with their own following, and the lattes carry the program. The Soul Chai is the house move. Outdoor seating runs along the tree-lined Ainsworth block. Tuesday through Saturday only, mornings into early afternoon. Order a Soul Chai if you came in for the drink Kiss is known for. Order an egg sandwich and a latte if you want a Concordia morning the way the regulars build it.

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.