Roast Club, the coffee roaster that finally crowns a dream born in many places

Roast Club is just the last step in Iker Zago’s long adventure in specialty coffee, which brought him all the way from Italy to NYC to finally land in Barcelona where he founded his specialty coffee roaster

Roast Club is a man’s dream, born from the experiences – both extremely pleasant and awfully unpleasant – that have professionally trained Iker Zago, the specialty coffee roaster’s founder. 

Still very young, Iker already has a long career in coffee first and in specialty coffee then, which brought him from Italy to Australia and then to Formentera; from London to Costa Rica (where he learned more about the world of specialty coffee that – at that point – was already his main focus), to finally reach New York City. 

Here, together with a bunch of friends, it was time to follow his true dream: owning his own coffee shop. These long time friends where developing a tiny coffee space called “I Am Coffee”, an 8-square-metre coffee shop half-hidden in a corner of the East Village, not too far from Union Square, and they were looking for someone like Iker to carry on the project. But life is hard, and rent in New York can be outrageously expensive, and after a couple of years it was clear that I Am Coffee could not go on: for Iker, it was again time to start from scratch and reinvent himself.  

Back to Formentera, back to study, back to project something else: something that, this time would have been exclusively his. As a location, he chooses Barcelona: it was 2016 and the specialty coffee scene in the Spanish city were starting to grow… what better place to open a shop? That’s how Roast Club was born. 

Now, just six years later and with a pandemic in between, Roast Club is a striving business with two locations in town: a roastery with a take away corner and a café where coffee and brunch are served every day.