A toast to all who read and commented on the opening installment of this series. At the Houston Press, we know our neighbors are passionate and vocal about coffee, not just what’s poured in the cup but what’s poured from the hearts of those in Houston’s booming coffee industry, the hard-working people who make our coffee dreams come true.
There’s no clear estimate for places in the Greater Houston area serving the good stuff, but a conservative count puts the number at 500-ish and, according to ChatGPT (sorry!), the number might be closer to 2,500 if we’re counting bakeries, restaurants and chains with the stand-alone cafés we enjoy. We have plenty of ground to cover as we continue this fact-finding journey toward the 2026 “Best Coffee” honoree in our annual Best of Houston® series.
This is only the second go-round, but it’s already clear the best part of this adventure will be getting to meet interesting Houstonians over excellent coffees. They’ll be family members and cherished friends and some people in the public eye. As suggested in the series kickoff, they’re all folks I know and trust because they know and trust coffee. In this installment, that person is Julian Cebrian.
Julian (informal here because we’re sharing coffees, coffee talk and some gossip, all requisite for this series) is a family friend; but, moreover he’s a career coffee man, someone whose work and own entrepreneurial interests are expressly coffee-related. While he is a friend, you’ll also see he’s a Houston coffee insider.
The morning we spoke by phone, I was sipping a Dutch Bros. vanilla caramel, hot and black, and he’d just finished brekkie with his super cute daughter, Olivia. Julian is a dad now and the budding business owner of Channelview Coffee Co., but once he was a teenager sitting in my brother’s class at Furr High School on the city’s east side. Teacher and student bonded during those years and Julian remained a family friend past graduation. He said, oddly enough, he’s never shared a cup of coffee with my brother. I asked where he’d take him for their first.
“Oh, you know what? Something maybe not too clean cut, something that has like a little dirtiness to it, something more gritty,” he said. “You know, I’d probably send him to Agora. Agora’s a pretty cool spot.”
Agora (1712 Westheimer) is also a bar that serves beer and that is my brother’s preferred beverage. Not sure what kind of student Julian was back in the day, but he understood this assignment and aced it because he has a deep knowledge of coffee, Houston’s coffee scene and people. He’s gained that knowledge from years working in Houston’s cafés since graduation.
“I was hanging out with this girl I liked in high school and she would want to go get Starbucks, so we’d walk from her mom’s apartment to the Starbucks in Gulfgate,” he recalled of his first coffee encounters. “I was like, okay, this is cool and whatnot, so I just started drinking Starbucks more regularly, and funny enough, after high school, it became my first job. And I think it was very important for me to work there because it taught me so much on how to work with coworkers.”
From three years at that Starbucks on Wallisville Road, he moved into specialty coffee spots like Amille’s Coffee, The Yellow Cup, Southside Espresso and BlendIn Coffee Club. He’s now been working for Greenway Coffee for three years. He’s deep in the game but even he – an insider – is surprised by the growth of Houston’s coffee industry, especially over the last five years.
“I’ll give you three and I think they’ll be a little different from one another,” he said excitedly of his top coffee picks. “The first spot that I would recommend, and this spot caters more to people that like the fun drinks, the drinks that are super trendy. I think if people like La La Land, for people that specifically like drinks like that, I’d really recommend a coffee shop called Twotone.”
Twotone (7925 Katy Freeway) “is doing these fun, creative drinks and doing it at a really high quality and they always have a line out the door. The owner, Tom, he’s a great guy. I met him judging a competition where the baristas had to create a signature beverage for a coffee shop. And he, he was such a nice guy,” Julian said.
“When I finally checked it out, I was like, okay, this is legit. And usually, I’m a person that drinks just a double espresso or pour over in the morning, but these drinks that they’re offering are so good, and I think it caters to a lot of people that don’t traditionally just drink espresso or pour over and want like a really sweet treat.”
We agreed that, like La La Land, Twotone’s offerings are TikTok and IG ready. The place is open and spacious and sparsely furnished. More room for the many Zoomers and Millennials who flock to the space. There were more than a dozen people waiting for drinks at two in the afternoon on a Tuesday during our visit. We tried That Purple Stuff (espresso, milk and ube crème) and Jade, (a pandan milk and crème espresso), both iced. Incredibly creamy and delicious.
That Julian led with that spot suggests he knows what drives the coffee industry in 2026. He recommended Twotone’s Golden Kernal (a sweet corn latte), the Black Sesame coffee, which he said was “exceptional,” and their ube matcha latte.
“They have a lot of different stuff that’s for everybody there, it’s all done with high quality, so, I can’t rave about that place enough,” he said.
Blacksmith (1018 Westheimer) is owned by Greenway Coffee, “the company that I work with,” he said of his second selection, where we had a hot vanilla latte and a scratch-made biscuit, previously raved about by our food writers.
“The thing I like about Blacksmith, they have multiple shops but this one in particular, it’s a brick and mortar and they have a full kitchen. So, there’s not many places that can do great coffee and also great food at such an equal level, right? Because most of the time, you go to a place and, you know, the food’s great but the coffee is pretty average or they do the coffee well, but the food’s pretty average. I think Blacksmith just does such a good job of presenting both. And they’ve been around for such a long time, you know? On the weekends, they always have a line out the door,” he noted. “It’s honestly a Houston fan favorite.”
“I’m gonna just have to give a classic on this one,” he said of his third selection. “Since we’re talking love for Houston, you know, we got to go with the OG, Catalina Coffee.”
Catalina Coffee (2201 Washington) is a longtime favorite, a former Houston Press Best Coffee award winner, and is perennially on Houston’s best coffee lists.
“I’ve never not had a good coffee at Catalina, and I think it’s more for the people that truly love coffee. If you want to start your day with an espresso or drip coffee, that’s where you go,” he said. “They always have a line out the door, man. I would definitely put the OG Catalina on there. How could you not?”
“And if I can, I’ll give some honorable mentions too,” Julian said, now on a roll and in his element. He recommended Simply Coffie in the Heights (“If you are a super true coffee connoisseur” and said, “you might spend an arm and a leg, but, you’re getting what you pay for”).
“And then the other place that I would recommend is a place called Third Place,” he said. “Third Place is inside of Jūn, it’s a restaurant in the Heights, but during the daytime they’re a coffee bar. I’ve only been once, and the drink that I got was probably one of the best coffee curated drinks that I’ve ever had. It was like a salted peanut foam cold brew, and that drink was exceptional. I would recommend anybody in Houston that can, you know, obviously have peanuts, try this drink because it’s honestly one of the best drinks I’ve ever had.”
Julian isn’t content to keep all this coffee knowledge, acquired by years in the trade, to himself. He’s recently launched Channelview Coffee Co., his own brand of bottled coffees and teas. There’s a form for weekly pre-orders for pickup or delivery of drinks like a signature horchata latte, a honey butter and oak latte, a sweet elote latte, a strawberry matcha and more. He’d previously attempted sales as Eastside Cold Brew but shelved the idea for a bit because, “I kind of just didn’t know what I was doing.
“I feel like I’m in a better position now because of the resources that I have around me,” he said. “The company that I work for, my boss, they’re so great. They’re willing to help me out with ordering anything I need or if I need to make drinks in the café they lend me space, which is so, so kind of them. And, I have somewhat of an espresso set up at my house, too. It’s not very glamorous, but you know, it gets the job done.”
He said he’d like to open a café in Channelview, where he lives, and “maybe the east side, maybe Baytown, maybe Crosby, who knows?”
When asked for some chisme – the gossip that pairs so well with cafecito – Julian said there’s a café he used to frequent a lot but now avoids since an ownership change removed many good coffee people from the establishment. As we wrap our chat, he reiterates the point of this coffee journey, from his own perspective.
“I’m even more excited about meeting the new people that I get to offer this product to and build connections with because that’s ultimately what coffee is all about,” he said. “You can go most places and have a good cup of coffee, but what people are really going for is that interaction that you’re going to have, you know? It sets the tone on your day. I think that’s super important.”
