Hard Lines Cafe — Restaurant in Wales

The best coffee shop in Cardiff! The top 3 best espresso’s I’ve ever had in my life. After traveling for the last decade around America, Europe and the Middle East, the Kenyan kaguyu AA was extracted perfectly from Hardlines cafe in Cardiff. Often having taste notes such as blackberry, treacle and hibiscus you often don’t taste that and usually quite disappointed as you drink a bitter/ sour espresso…. But the description is bang on perfect as the flavors explode in your mouth with perfect sweetness and taste balance. It’s exactly what it says it is. I ordered a second literally instantly because of how good this tasted. It has reinvented the idea in my mind of what a good espresso tastes like. The culture is humble - kind, loving and caring. Being the best espresso - a kind culture and workers that are willing to discuss and open about their extracting process is rare. They’ve done a great job at making it all about quality without snobbery. A welcoming and enjoyable environment to be apart of and glad that I was able to experience it for a moment.

(Apologies for the half eaten food pic) but it was too good to wait. A very generous amount of food for a great price - especially in this economic climate. I had a breakfast bun - a bun as soft as a cloud and filling for such a good price.

You have to come here. It was worth the 3.5 hour drive alone just for the espresso on the flight I bought. Fire merch - fire food - exquisite espresso - phenomenal customer...

Food and coffee are pretty good, but I genuinely think they've trained their staff to be as rude as possible on purpose as a tactic to entice coffee snobs to come from far and wide.

Every time I've been in here, a member of staff has been short, rude, or scoffed at me. I once asked for artificial sweetener and the server laughed IN MY FACE and said, "We actually only do brown sugar". I'm a diabetic...

On another occasion, I asked for a large filter coffee and was told, "We only do one size. "... It's filter coffee. It's not like having a Flat White with a certain ratio of milk to coffee. It's already mixed? I want to buy more of your product?

The final straw was ordering a Flat White, being asked to wait outside even though the cafe was nearly empty, waiting over 15 minutes to find they had forgotten my order, then being served an expresso sized cup with hardly any milk in it. (I am aware proper Flat Whites are smaller than what most coffee shops serve).

In the end I just threw it in the bin and went to Ffloc. From the attitude of the staff, I didn't trust them to take my dissatisfaction seriously.

On a final note, you'll get a dramatically better Flat White and brownie at Blend in Grangetown. Nice to see a small business actually owned by local people, and the guy there even smiled and was polite :o

The single toilet in there is...

Great brunch, we had the big breakfast and burritos. Super delicious and the coffee is lush. Service is overall great, but one of the waitresses was really rude. We had come in during a busy period, and I asked about a table. I was told to grab one as it came up, and it did quite quickly. We sat in a booth whilst waiting for our other friend and I got up to order food whilst my friend and baby stayed in booth. The waitress told my friend to move as the table was reserved. There was no sign, and that wasn't mentioned at the time I sat down. She then said we'd have to wait for whoever was in front of us in the queue to have a table. I said that wasn't very reasonable, considering we'd been sat down for 15 mins already. She was really dismissive and eventually said that we'd have to sit on a table for 2 (we were waiting for a friend). I saw a booth coming up but she said no to that. She then said again about the table for 2 and said in a really rude way - "will that be ok for you?!" It wasn't really, but we took it. Then she managed to get another table to pop together, which was great. I don't understand the need to be rude in situations like that. It wasn't anyone's fault, but created bad feeling from the start. Shame as the food and coffee and general...