"Slow" Is Not a Word They Know: Nikolay Dimitrov of Barista Expert

One sentence in this conversation runs against the name of the publication it appears in, and it is more honest at the top than buried halfway down.

"Fast is part of our everyday. We simply do not know the word slow. What matters is that speed never comes at the expense of quality."

NIKOLAY DIMITROV, BARISTA EXPERT

Nikolay Dimitrov is the founder of Barista Expert, a coffee catering and barista accessories company started in 2023 after more than ten years in professional coffee solutions. Barista Expert was among the participants at Good Coffee Festival 2026 in front of NDK. What follows comes from a Slow Made City conversation around the festival - ten short questions, none of them about turnover or locations.

Catering explains the sentence. A mobile bar has no queue that can be stretched: there is an event, a gap between two presentations, and a hundred people who want a cappuccino inside the same fifteen minute window. Slow, there, is the word for late. The slow part has already happened - in the preparation, the setup, the decision about what to serve at all.

The silence you rarely hear

What is silence to someone who works under the hiss of the machine?

"Priceless. Maybe precisely because we rarely hear it, we value it most."

NIKOLAY DIMITROV, BARISTA EXPERT

The answer is two sentences and the second carries the weight. The value comes from the scarcity. Behind a professional bar the constant background is steam, the grinder, the portafilter knocking into the bin and the conversation out front; you stop hearing them after the first hour and start hearing them again only when they stop.

The eyes come first

Does he read a person by the order or by the way they wait? Nikolay Dimitrov takes neither.

"Mostly by the eyes. We always look at the person and that tells us far more about them. The drink depends on their day and their mood, and even the way they wait tells us something. The eyes almost always get it right."

NIKOLAY DIMITROV, BARISTA EXPERT

The practical consequence is in the pace of service. The order is information that arrives late - it was settled before the person reached the bar. The look comes first and leaves a few seconds in which the tone, the length of the exchange, or whether there is an exchange at all, can still change.

At an event it is also the only instrument available. No regulars, no history, no "the usual". A hundred strangers in an hour.

The order that tells a biography

Which order tells a whole biography? The answer stepped outside the cup.

"An order for good barista accessories. For us that is a sign of respect for coffee and for the small details that make the experience better."

NIKOLAY DIMITROV, BARISTA EXPERT

This is the other half of the business talking: Barista Expert sells the tools as well. The answer holds up outside the commercial interest, because a list of accessories is an X-ray of a bar.

Whoever orders a distributor and a tamper in the right diameter has already accepted that a level bed decides how much of the dose takes part in the extraction. Whoever puts a scale with a timer under the portafilter has stopped dosing by eye. Whoever changes the basket has reached the level where differences under a gram are worth chasing. None of it is required to get coffee out. Each of them means someone solved a problem they had noticed.

Coffee as a reason

When is coffee an excuse and when is it a reason?

"For us it is always a reason - for a better day, for a meeting, for a conversation, or simply for a few minutes to yourself."

NIKOLAY DIMITROV, BARISTA EXPERT

The answer refuses half the question. "Let's have a coffee" works in Bulgaria as a way of saying something else too: that time will be found, that the conversation will happen. Nikolay Dimitrov declines that role for the drink and leaves it to be itself.

The recipe nobody keeps

Is there a recipe kept like a family secret? The question usually gets a smile and silence.

"We always share everything, because we believe that is the only way we can develop together and help each other."

NIKOLAY DIMITROV, BARISTA EXPERT

In coffee, sharing has grounds. An espresso recipe is dose, yield, time and temperature - four numbers that many bars keep on a board next to the machine anyway. What hides inside them is the setting of one particular grinder with one particular lot on one particular day, and that does not copy, because it does not travel.

The cup that does not leave

Has he ever been ashamed of a cup he served?

"If there is even the smallest doubt about whether the cup is good enough, it does not get served. Better to make it again than to compromise."

NIKOLAY DIMITROV, BARISTA EXPERT

The threshold sits on the doubt rather than on the defect. That is stricter than it sounds: nothing has to be visibly wrong, it is enough for it not to be certain. At an event where cups are counted in hundreds, a rule like that costs time at exactly the moment there is none.

The most difficult customer had been teaching the same lesson.

"That we always have to pay even more attention to the details. Sometimes it is the most demanding person who shows us something we can do better."

NIKOLAY DIMITROV, BARISTA EXPERT

"Exactly what I needed today"

What is the best thing he has heard at the bar that was not said to him?

"Probably those small conversations where people forget we are nearby. Our favourites are the moments when someone says: 'Exactly what I needed today.' Not because they are talking only about the coffee, but because we feel that we handed them a bit of a mood along with it."

NIKOLAY DIMITROV, BARISTA EXPERT

The sentence was overheard rather than received, which makes it more reliable than any feedback handed over at the bar. Nobody overdoes their thanks to themselves.

The last question was what kind of morning he would hand the person across the counter. The answer was two adjectives: smiling and positive.

"We want the person to leave with the feeling that their day can start a little better."

NIKOLAY DIMITROV, BARISTA EXPERT

Barista Expert was on the square in front of NDK from 11 to 13 September. The speed from the opening applies to the fifteen minutes between two presentations. Everything that makes them possible happened slowly and in advance.