Bib Roastery

Babbo Collective, a chain of two restaurants and two cafés owned by the Danish restauranteur Lennart Petersen, opened its own roastery.

The newly opened roastery, named Bib Roastery, occupies the location next door to the Babbo Collective Parkveien shop in Western Oslo’s affluent Vika area.

The roastery’s interior features a completely open space, with the roasting machine standing on one end of the room while the service counter taking up the other. In between, there are 3 window seats, 3 small coffee tables with white granite tops as well as a large wooden table in the corner. This allows roughly 15 people in total to sit comfortably inside at the same time.

The space is decorated in a simple and elegant style: the pale mustard-yellow walls compliment the all-white furniture, creating a relaxed vibe of cosiness; this also partly hints at the continuation of the Babbo Collective Øverfoss shop, which is located in the city’s young and vibrant Grünerløkka area.

On the menu, one can find the usual coffee drinks—just cheaper than most specialty cafés in town, some simple food and snacks, as well as 3 kinds of cakes similar to those served in Restaurant Alex, which is also part of Babbo Collective, about 10 minutes walk away.

We tried a pour-over with beans from Kenya and a single café latte with oat milk (both 49 NOK) and were happy with both. The pour-over had a bright and fruity flavour, smooth and easy to drink while the latte tasted slightly darker, but also very good.

For simple food and cakes, we tried a cheese and butter sandwich (35 NOK), a slice of both the lemon cake (66 NOK) and the coconut cake (46 NOK). The sandwich had comté cheese and whipped butter squeezed between two moist slices of sourdough bread, and it was bascially the Babbo classic BMO butter and cheese bun in bread form. The coconut cake, slighly sweet, had a strong coconut flavour and a chocolate frosting on the outside. The lemon cake was our absolute favourite: wrapped in a simple, innocent and somewhat plain look, it delivered a heavy punch of citric acidity, cutting through all the previous tastes with a refreshing blast of tanginess.

Even though the roastery was still in experimentation stage, it did not mean everyone on the team was new to the craft. The woman in charge of the coffee is Dina Lohne Henden, who joined Babbo in August 2024 after 4 years of working in Oslo’s well-liked Java coffee shop. When asked—and if she was not too busy, she could explain to you how she chooses different brewers for different kind of beans.

One can also buy beans at the roastery to take home—preferrably in small quantities (50 grams). This is partly because the roastery is still testing out different techniques, and they would love to have the customer’s feedback as soon as possible, so as to make fast changes. “We would like people to come back more often, instead of buying a large bag that lasts forever. In this way, we can quickly figure out unexpected problems with the beans,” Alexandra Ek, one of Babbo Collective’s owners, told us.

In fact, fast changes and adapations have always been the hallmark of the Babbo Collective team. The opening of Bib is such an example: its location has been used as half-office and half-storage for almost two years before the owners “suddenly decided to open a roastery here”, said Alexandra Ek.

“We do not like making plans…and planning long ahead will just ruin the fun,” she added. One can actually find such an approach in almost all Babbo endeavours. Very soon they will open a new bakery named Frida, which was supposed to open in Autumn 2024. Do it first and fix the problems later—you may call such a business philosophy impulsive, reckless and sometimes even a bit disruptive to the whole industry, but when you come to their places and meet these people, you know at once that they are here for serious business.