How Does Bucharest Drink Its Coffee? What 250 Strangers Taught Us at the Slow Coffee Festival

3rd Space Bucharest was invited to take part in the Slow Coffee Festival.

Funny thing is, we don't sell coffee.

We don't roast beans. We don't own a café. Heck, my coffee machine at home isn't even that great.

But there's one thing I do know how to do: get strangers talking.

One very important question

So instead of bringing coffee, we brought a question. I had a giant voting wall built to answer it:

How does Bucharest drink its coffee?

• ☕ Sugar or no sugar?
• ☕ Regular milk or oat milk?
• ☕ Before 8:30am or after 9am?
• ☕ Plus a few more questions

Simple choices. A pack of stickers. That was the whole setup.

One person. Then three. Then a crowd.

We put the board up at 11am.

One person stopped.

Then three.

Then a small crowd.

Camelia Ionescu, our social media genius, and I were glued to that board until 4pm. Honestly, we could have stayed five more hours. By the end of the day, more than 250 people had stopped to vote.

At one point I stepped back, looked at the wall completely covered in stickers, and thought:

We needed a second board. 😂

The stickers took five seconds. The conversations took longer.

Here's what surprised me.

The vote itself was over in seconds. But almost nobody just voted and walked away.

Someone would put down their sticker and immediately start defending it. (Who knew there's such a thing as pea milk? 🤔)

Five minutes later, we'd be talking about something else entirely — what they love about living in Bucharest, where they get their coffee, how long they've been in the city.

Some people already knew about 3rd Space Bucharest, which was really cool to hear.

Most had no idea who we were.

And nobody seemed to mind.

So, how does Bucharest drink its coffee?

We counted every sticker afterwards. Around 1,190 of them. Here's the city's verdict:

Espresso won in a landslide, and more than three quarters of the city takes it with nothing added. The oat-milk crowd is real, but it's a quarter of the room, not half. And the only genuinely close call was what time the first coffee happens.

Why this matters to us

This is the whole idea behind 3rd Space Bucharest.

Most people aren't short on opinions. They're short on easy, low-pressure reasons to share them with someone new. Give people a small, fun excuse to start, and the conversation takes care of itself.

We didn't need a stage, a pitch, or a product.

All it took to get people talking was a wall, a pack of stickers…

and a city full of very strong coffee opinions. ☕😃

Want to meet more people in Bucharest — in real life, not just online? Come to one of our 3rd Space Bucharest events. We'd love to meet you.

Running a festival, a brand or a venue and want a room full of people talking about it? Here's how we partner with brands and venues.