Curran Coffee

Curran shares a wall and an open doorway with The Spar in Old Town, so you can carry an espresso straight into Tacoma's oldest tavern. Jordyn and Emily Curran, sisters in their twenties, took over the tavern's long running attached cafe in 2022 and rebuilt it. It was handed to them by Adrielle Flinders, whose grandmother Kathy Manke bought The Spar in the 1980s, on the reasoning that the space deserved more attention than it was getting.

The beans are Valhalla Coffee, roasted in Tacoma, which the Spar Cafe poured before them and the Currans kept. The house drinks carry names: the Puget Fog is an earl grey oat milk latte and is the one most obviously theirs. The Gemini runs vanilla bean, hazelnut and salted caramel, the Taurus vanilla chai, chocolate and macadamia. On the cold side sit the Desert Rain and the Wild Rose, and the Jam is a smoothie of peanut butter, marionberry, strawberry, banana, honey and coconut milk.

The room is the other half of it: whitewashed trim, a mahogany bar, red brick walls and schoolhouse pendant lights, plants throughout including a fiddle leaf fig, and a seventies orange loveseat with coffee table books on it. Food comes in from named suppliers, Macrina Bakery pastries, Blazing Bagels with Cutting Edge Foods cream cheese, and vegan and gluten free bars from Art of Crunch.

It runs 6am to 6pm on weekdays and 7am to 6pm at weekends, and it gets busy enough that a line is normal. Old Town puts it a short walk from the Ruston Way waterfront, which is the obvious thing to do with the cup once you have it.