Scenery Coffee shares 171 Union Street in Southwark with Jerwood Space, a performing-arts rehearsal venue housed in a former Victorian school. This is the roaster’s own café: coffee is roasted on site, and the business supplies beans wholesale too.
The coffee deserves your attention, though it needn’t demand a lengthy deliberation. Facility, the house espresso blend, is designed for both black and milk drinks; batch brew sits alongside a changing selection of single-dose pour-overs and single-origin espressos. You can settle on a flat white or spend a little longer considering the single-dose list. Retail beans are available to take home.
Scenery’s way of describing roast levels is particularly thoughtful: the categories indicate how much influence roasting has on the flavour. Its lighter styles favour clarity, but the wider range extends through medium to heavy profiles. Lightness is an interest here, rather than an article of faith. That gives the business a broader outlook than a glance at its more exploratory coffees might suggest.
The rooms have variety of their own, with seating extending through a gallery, a planted glasshouse and a courtyard. The kitchen serves weekday breakfast and small-plate lunches, with brunch on Saturdays. Coffee may be the reason you picked the place, but lunch is a perfectly reasonable development.
Scenery is especially appealing for a longer morning built around coffee. Keep the emphasis on morning or early afternoon: weekday service runs from 7.30am to 4pm, and Sundays are closed. The changing coffee list is reason enough to come; the kitchen and glasshouse make a persuasive case for staying.