Beans & Dots

Anca Ungureanu founded Beans & Dots in 2016 after two years living in Berlin, where a cafe near her apartment run by The Barn changed how she thought about coffee. She brought that relationship home, becoming Romania's exclusive distributor for the Berlin roaster and building the business around it, with fashion designer Adelina Ivan co launching alongside her and running a concept store on the same floor, and Alexandru Aron, a co founder of the TAG Bucuresti coworking space, joining as a shareholder.

The shop sits inside Palatul Universul, built between 1926 and 1930 as headquarters for the Universul newspaper, once printing fifty thousand copies a day before falling dormant after 1945. Aron and his partners revived the building in 2017, bringing in TAG's coworking floors, the Mezanin events space, and the Apollo111 wine bar alongside the cafe. More than a hundred rotating single origin lots move through the counter each year, sold by the cup and by the bag, in a soaring, industrial room built for freelancers and students to settle into rather than grab a coffee and go.