Miso caramel. Cardamom honey. Spring onion. Yes, really. I tried them all.
Let me set the scene.
It’s a Thursday morning. I’m standing at the counter of a specialty café I hadn’t been to before, staring at a menu item called a “miso caramel cortado.” The barista is watching me process it. I order it, slightly against my own instincts, because I run a coffee blog and “slightly against my own instincts” is basically the job description.
What arrived was one of the stranger and more interesting things I’ve put in my mouth in recent memory. And it opened a door into a trend I’ve been chasing ever since.
What “swavory” actually means
Food and drink trend-watchers have started calling this “swavory” — a blend of sweet and savoury — and it describes the direction a lot of café menus are moving in 2026. Away from purely sweet flavour additions (vanilla, caramel in its traditional sense, hazelnut) and toward combinations that borrow from food traditions: fermented, earthy, botanical, unexpected.
The flavours showing up include miso-caramel, which is exactly what it sounds like — fermented soybean paste bringing a salty depth to the sweetness of caramel. Cardamom-honey, rooted in Middle Eastern and South Asian cooking traditions that have paired those two flavours for centuries. Lavender-rosemary, which has been appearing on some upscale café menus as a botanical pairing for espresso. And, most provocatively, spring onion coffee — a social media sensation that I approached with maximum scepticism and came away from genuinely surprised.
The miso caramel cortado
Back to Thursday morning.
The drink was a double ristretto — short extraction, concentrated, sweeter than a standard espresso — with a small amount of miso-caramel syrup and a splash of whole milk. No foam. Served in a small glass so you could see the layering.
The first sip was strange. Sweet, then savoury, then a lingering fermented note that I would not have predicted would work with coffee but absolutely did. The miso doesn’t taste like soup. It tastes like depth — a salty, slightly funky quality that cuts through the sweetness and makes the whole thing more complex than any caramel drink I’ve had before.
By the last sip I understood it. By the time I left the café I was already thinking about when I’d come back.
Cardamom and honey — the one that made the most sense to me
This one I understood immediately, because cardamom and coffee is not new at all. It’s been the base of Arabic coffee — qahwa — for centuries. The combination of the spice’s citrusy warmth and the natural bitterness of coffee is one of those pairings that feels like it was always meant to exist.
The 2026 version adds honey instead of sugar, which changes the sweetness profile considerably. Honey has a floral quality that sugar doesn’t — it carries its own flavour rather than just adding sweetness — and with cardamom and a medium-roast espresso, the result is something that tastes simultaneously ancient and new.
This is the one I’ve tried to recreate at home. I’m getting closer.
The spring onion one
I need to address this. I know.
The spring onion latte came out of South Korea’s café scene and spread across social media — green onion blended into sweet cream or milk, poured over espresso — and the reaction split cleanly between “why would anyone” and “actually, wait.”
I tracked down a version of it. I approached it with the energy of someone doing their homework rather than their enjoyment.
Here is my honest assessment: it is not delicious in the way that a great coffee is delicious. It is interesting in the way that a great dish that you can’t quite categorize is interesting. The spring onion brings an herbal, very slightly pungent note that is disorienting in a coffee context and then, somehow, stops being disorienting after a few sips and starts being just… a flavour. One that I wouldn’t choose every morning but that I’m glad I tried.
The honey is necessary. Without it, the whole thing tips in a direction I don’t want to follow.
Why this trend matters beyond the novelty
What swavory coffees are doing is something the specialty coffee world has been wanting for a while: connecting the flavour complexity already present in good beans to a wider vocabulary of taste. A well-sourced Ethiopian coffee already has fruity, floral, fermented notes — it’s practically halfway to interesting on its own. Swavory additions, when done with care, meet those qualities rather than covering them.
When a barista pairs a miso-caramel with a Yirgacheffe, they’re not obscuring the bean — they’re having a conversation with it. The savoury depth of the miso mirrors the earthiness in the coffee. The caramel lifts the brightness. The whole thing becomes more than the sum of its parts.
That’s interesting. That’s what I go to cafés for.
The one I want to try next
I’ve heard about a jaggery-pepper espresso doing the rounds in Bangalore — dark jaggery syrup, a small amount of cracked black pepper, a double shot pulled slightly long for sweetness. That’s next. I’ll report back.
Your turn
Which swavory combination would you try, and which one is a hard no?
the spring onion is the real test
Tell me in the comments →Read next: The Pistachio Latte Problem
Another one to try: I Tried the Black Sesame Latte Everyone’s Talking About
