YUSU: Specialty Coffee in Oost, Amsterdam

What YUSU Gets Right

Walk into YUSU on a weekday morning and the first thing you notice is the range of people already there, students with laptops, locals picking up a flat white before the commute, small groups lingering over something from the pastry counter. Kick van Doorn and Nicole Lieuw opened this place in September 2020, and the fact that it's earned 580 Google reviews at 4.6 is less surprising once you've spent an hour inside.

The coffee comes from Black to Black Coffee, and the espresso programme is where Kick's expertise shows. The flat white is well-balanced, milk texturing is controlled, the extraction is clean, and the Colombian beans give it enough brightness to hold up through the milk. Filter is on the menu too, which earns points in a city where espresso still dominates most café counters.

But the matcha programme is arguably the bigger story. This isn't a token oat milk matcha bolted onto a coffee menu as an afterthought. YUSU treats it as a genuine parallel offering, and the Matcha Latte has built its own following. If you're the kind of person who orders matcha and then quietly judges the execution, this is worth your attention.

Nicole handles the baking, and it's specific enough to be worth naming: Pão de queijo, the chewy Brazilian cheese bread, sits alongside an orange coconut cake and a fig cheesecake that reflect Surinamese influence. These aren't decorative touches. They're the reason people come back mid-afternoon when the coffee order is almost secondary.

The space carries Scandinavian and Moroccan design references without those two things fighting each other, clean lines, warm materials, music at a volume that makes conversation possible without the room feeling silent. The crowd skews young and international, which tracks for the neighbourhood's proximity to the Amsterdam Fashion Institute.

A note on timing: peak hours fill the room fast, and if you're planning a focused work session, the off-peak window is worth targeting. The power outlets are there and the Wi-Fi works, but the energy during busy periods is social rather than studious.

YUSU also functions as a platform for local artists, rotating work on the walls, occasional collaborations, which gives the space a texture that most coffee bars don't bother with. It doesn't feel forced. It feels like the founders actually mean it.