Explore Sarajevo / Hidden Gems / Café Barometar
Hidden Gem · Centar · 4 min read
Café Barometar
Exposed brick, hanging machinery, hand-built furniture — the most original interior in central Sarajevo, doubling as a strong-coffee café and a craft-beer bar.
- Established
- 2016 (approx.)
Address
Branilaca Sarajeva 25, Centar
Hours
Typically 08:00–24:00
Price
Coffee 2–4 BAM; beer 3–5 BAM; cocktails 7–12 BAM
Getting there
5 min walk west of the Eternal Flame; central pedestrian district
Time needed
An hour or three
Best time
Late afternoon, when day-light gives the interior its best mood
Coordinates
43.8576° N 18.4213° E
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Sarajevo has many cafés. It has fewer cafés that you walk into and immediately want to take a photograph of the room. Café Barometar is in the second category — and has been, since it opened in the central pedestrian district somewhere around 2016, gathering a steady reputation as the city’s best-looking small interior.
It is also, by most accounts, a perfectly good place to drink things.
The look
The interior is what gets the attention. The walls are exposed brick, deliberately unfinished, with patches of plaster left to age. The ceiling carries a tangle of visible metal pipes and conduits — partly functional, partly arranged. Vintage machinery and old industrial fittings hang from the walls and ceiling at various heights: brass dials, pressure gauges, wheel valves, antique tools, mechanical instruments whose original purposes are now decorative. The lamps are unusual — old enamel pendant lights, naked bulbs in metal cages, a few small theatrical pieces — and they are arranged at varying heights, so the light in the room comes from a dozen different points.
The furniture is handmade — chunky wooden tables with iron frames, chairs and benches assembled from reclaimed materials, a long bar of dark stained timber. Nothing matches. Everything works.
The overall effect is somewhere between a Brooklyn third-wave café in 2013 and a small-town European workshop that has been quietly cooking down for a hundred years. The aesthetic is “industrial” in the way the term is now used in interior design — meaning, generously, unfinished with intent. The execution is unusually careful.
What it is during the day
By daylight the café side of Barometar is a working café: serious Bosnian coffee served the proper way; espresso pulled from a competent machine; a decent flat white; the standard menu of macchiatos, cappuccinos, and lattes. There is a small selection of teas and homemade lemonades. The kitchen is small but reliable for breakfast and light food — eggs, sandwiches, toasts.
The Wi-Fi is fast. The seats are comfortable. The volume is low enough that a laptop is welcome. It is one of the better central spots for solo travellers who want to work for two or three hours in a space that does not feel like a chain coffee shop.
What it is at night
By evening, Barometar tilts toward the bar side of its identity. The lights drop. Music gets louder. The crowd shifts from laptop people to friends-after-work people to date people. The draft beer list rotates between local Bosnian breweries and a few imported European craft labels. Cocktails are competent — old fashioneds, negronis, gin and tonics, with a few of the bar’s own creations.
Prices remain modest by European-capital standards: pints from around 3 BAM, cocktails 7–12 BAM, the same Bosnian coffee that costs you 2 BAM at 11 a.m. for 2 BAM at 11 p.m.
Why it works
There are cafés with better coffee in Sarajevo. There are bars with longer beer lists. There are restaurants with more careful food. There are not many places in the city where a person from Berlin or Lisbon or New York would walk in and immediately understand, without translation, what the room is doing.
Barometar is one of the things Sarajevo is now starting to do well: the small, design-conscious, multi-functional café-bar that doubles as a workspace and triples as an evening hangout. It does not feel imported. The materials are local, the prices are local, the staff are local. It just happens to be as good as the equivalent in any major European capital, at roughly one-third the price.
It is also, frankly, an excellent place to take a quiet meeting, charge your phone, and watch the centre of Sarajevo go by through the front windows.
Where it sits
Barometar is on Branilaca Sarajeva 25, in the central pedestrian district about five minutes’ walk west of the Eternal Flame and the Sarajevo Cathedral. It is easy to combine with any other central plan: lunch at Markale, an afternoon at the Sarajevo Roses or the Galerija 11/07/95, a coffee here on the way back. It is exactly the sort of place a city of this size needs more of, and exactly the kind of small business worth knowing about before you arrive.
Sources & further reading
More views
From Café Barometar
Photographs: Café Barometar · source · Used with permission
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