Boon Boona Coffee expanded its presence in the region with the opening of its fifth location on the Seattle Waterfront, featuring East African coffee traditions.
“This is how we roast our coffee,” owner Efrem Fesaha says while holding a pan of raw green beans over a single gas burner. He keeps his hand moving so the beans heat evenly, watching the color slowly start to change. “What I’m doing is basically taking green coffee, the raw product, and pan-roasting it the traditional way out of East Africa, from Ethiopia and Eritrea.” As the green turns to brown, he decides when to pull them off.
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“This is where you get to determine the roast level. Light, medium, dark roast.” A few minutes later, those same beans are ground, the coffee is brewed, and it is poured into a cup. “So we went from roasted to brewed to now serving it up.” That live demonstration is the first thing you see at Boon Boona’s new shop at the top of Overlook Walk.
This is the coffee company’s fifth location, and definitely its most visible location. Boon Boona started in Renton and has since added spots on Microsoft’s Redmond Campus, in Capitol Hill, inside the University of Washington bookstore, and now here on the waterfront. Opened in 2026, the shop sits on the new walkway that connects Pike Place Market down to the water. It comes with broad views of the bay, coffee sourced directly from Africa, wine and beer, and plenty of space for local artists, nonprofits, and small businesses to gather. The building itself sits on fresh ground, right where the old Alaskan Way Viaduct used to stand.
For Fesaha, the whole idea started with a single trip back to 2012. “We started this journey back in 2012, after a trip to Eritrea and the capital city, Asmara, where I was really inspired by the coffee culture there.” Coffee culture there moved at a completely different pace. People sat down, spent time together, and enjoyed the smell of beans being roasted right in the room. That stuck with him because of how he grew up. He moved to West Seattle when he was just five years old, and was raised between his family’s Eritrean roots and local Pacific Northwest life. “Having grown up here, specifically in West Seattle, the two things came together for me,” he says. “Both the traditional approach and the contemporary approach to coffee and cafes.”
You can see both worlds as soon as you walk in. On one side, you have high-end espresso machines and pour-over setups, which Fesaha loves just as much as any coffee enthusiast would.
“Of course we geek out heavy on our espresso machine and pour-overs,” he laughs. “But you’re going to get to see the traditional coffee ceremony as well.” Every single day starts with that traditional ceremony, roasting the raw green beans in a pan, grinding them, and brewing the coffee in a jebena. Fesaha’s mother, Tsegheweini, has even come in to lead the ceremony herself.
The coffee itself is what really sets Boon Boona Coffee apart. “We focus on African coffee, so we source all over the continent,” Fesaha explains. The company brings in beans from Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania, and all the way west to Cameroon. While Ethiopia gets most of the credit as the birthplace of the coffee crop, he is also interested in coffee from other countries. “Just knowing that Burundi, Tanzania, Rwanda, Kenya, all these places produce incredible coffees, even in West Africa to Cameroon, and we love showcasing that.”
That means giving customers plenty of choices. “So from the different producers to the different processing methods, light roast, medium roast, wherever you kind of find yourself at, we have that all available.”
Opening on the waterfront comes after a solid decade of hard work. Fesaha opened his very first spot on South Third Street in Renton, running it as both a roastery and a neighborhood cafe. By 2022, he was named Small-Business Person of the Year for both Washington and the Pacific Northwest.
Earlier this year, he received a Community Achievement Award from Key to Change, with the governor attending the event. The waterfront also holds personal significance for his family. It was one of the first places they saw when they moved to the US as immigrants in 1988. At the ribbon-cutting, Feseha called the new shop a dream come true for a kid raised in Seattle and was quick to share the credit with everyone who helped him get there.
