XO Espresso Bar

Dave McLennan, who grew up in Australia, and his wife Puja, who grew up immersed in Kenyan coffee culture, met roughly a decade ago in West Palm Beach and moved to Miami in 2017. They launched XO in February 2018 as a mobile coffee cart stationed outside the W Miami hotel in Brickell before opening this permanent room inside South Beach's Lincoln Eatery about a year later, their first space where customers could actually sit and stay a while.

The couple roasts in house, sourcing green beans from Aproccor, a Fair Trade and organic growers association in Copan, Honduras, a direct relationship that grounds the shop's identity past the cart it started as. A wide range of dairy and oat milk options keeps the menu flexible, and free wifi with indoor and outdoor seating makes the Lincoln Eatery room a genuine place to post up rather than pass through.