La Barba Coffee, which has two locations in Salt Lake City and one in Draper — and a devotion to sustainable beans — serves Utah’s best cup of joe, according to a national list released Monday.
Josh Rosenthal launched the roasting company seven years ago and today sells a mix of fair-trade, direct-trade and Rainforest Alliance Certified coffees. It’s a philosophy that helped it rise to the top of Food & Wine’s 2019 “Best Coffee in Every State” list.
“Since 2012, Utah’s best has been on a mission, multiple missions, actually, working not only to make great coffee accessible to everyone, without pretense,” author David Landsel wrote, “but also to keep their sourcing sustainable, with the goal of producers earning a living wage for the beans that La Barba buys.”
La Barba’s original store is located inside George Restaurant (formerly Finca) at 327 W. 200 South. It also has shops at The Gateway near the fountain and at 13811 Sprague Lane in Draper.
Food & Wine’s second annual “best coffee” list is “skewed toward the new and the interesting,” Landsel wrote. To claim the top spot in a state, businesses had to be coffee roasters for at least two years and “be able to deliver the whole package, or close to it — spectacular coffees, great retail operations, and passions for hospitality, community, and, better still, complete sustainability.”
The article also gives a shoutout to one of Salt Lake City’s newest coffee shops, Three Pines Coffee, and its owners Meg Frampton and Nick Price. After living in Los Angeles and making a run in the music business, the couple returned to their home state to open the shop at 165 S. Main.
Food & Wine called it “Salt Lake’s most precise, most modern, and very best little café, sourcing from some of the country’s finest.”
Kathy Stephenson covers food, dining, alcohol policy and features. A Utah native and University of Utah graduate, she has been a reporter at The Salt Lake Tribune for more than 30 years.