St. Hanshaugen

Croissant, pain au chocolat, pain suisse—it’s hard to imagine a city’s café scenes without the French pastries. It’s even harder to imagine a European city without any French pâtisseries. Encore, located on the edge bewteen St. Hanshaugen and Majorstuen, is exactly such a place in Oslo where you can find all kinds of exquisite French gâteaux and pastries. The Frenchman behind Encore is Théo Romer, who came to Oslo in 2015 for a job at Sebastien Bruno, a high-end chocolate chain named after one of the two owners. At that time, Romer was only 19 years old, at his last year of the pastry chef education in France, where he specialised in chocolate. Looking back today, chocolate has been the magical ingredient that played a central role throughout his career. ...

Java has become a landmark coffee shop right by St. Hanshaugen park ever since it opened its doors in 1997. Its owner–and the main barista–Robert Thoresen, originally trained as an architect, is one of the leading figures of the third-wave coffee movement in the Oslo coffee scene. The original plan, according to Thoresen’s interviews with local newspapers, was that the coffee bar should serve as the front to his architecture studio. Yet Thoresen got so fascinated by the coffee business and went on to win a string of illustrious coffee-related titles including the first edition of the World Barista Championship in Morocco in 2000. ...