Roseline’s New East Burnside Cafe: What to Expect

Roseline is putting a cafe in the old Starbucks at 2803 E. Burnside. Permits are in with the city, co-owner Keith Schuman has said the team is aiming to open later this fall, and the space runs roughly 1,600 square feet. It will be the roaster’s eighth location in Oregon.

That’s the whole of the confirmed news, and I want to be straight about it before spending 500 words on what it means: nobody has posted a menu, a date, or a build-out rendering. What follows is informed guessing based on what Roseline already does in its other rooms.

Why this particular corner matters

Burnside and 28th is one of the few Portland intersections that actually works on foot. You can eat, drink, browse, and get a haircut inside two blocks, and the foot traffic doesn’t die at 3 p.m. the way it does in a lot of the city’s commercial pockets. A cafe there gets three different customer waves — morning commuters, midday laptop people, and the pre-dinner crowd killing forty minutes before a reservation. Most neighborhood cafes only get one of those.

The other thing worth naming: this is a former Starbucks. Portland is now several rounds into a pattern where local roasters take over corporate coffee’s abandoned leases, and it keeps happening for an unromantic reason — those spaces come with plumbing, electrical, and a grease-free build-out already sized for a coffee bar. A siting decision that looks like a statement about local coffee beating the chain is usually, underneath, a decision about not paying for new plumbing. Both things can be true.

What to expect in the cup

Marty Lopes founded Roseline in Portland in 2012, and it built its early reputation as a wholesale roasting company. He is not the one opening this cafe. Keith Schuman and Matthew Bloch bought the brand in 2020, and the Roseline expanding onto Burnside is theirs — same name, different owners, and a full post-pandemic rebrand with new identity, packaging, and website behind it. Lopes has long since moved on to his own wholesale-only venture.

What the current owners have done with it is mostly an expansion story. In the five years since the acquisition they have pushed the wholesale side and built out retail. Roseline currently lists seven cafes: the Davis Street flagship attached to the roastery, Alberta, Goat Blocks, KOIN Tower, the Woodlark Hotel, Lake Oswego, and Montgomery Park. That last one, at 2701 NW Vaughn, is a roughly 2,000-square-foot room carved out of the Menashe-owned Northwest Portland landmark and the largest retail space the brand has taken on to date. In July the NE Davis headquarters also became home to Session Room, a showroom and training space Roseline opened alongside brewer maker Ratio and Bellissimo Coffee Advisors, with Roseline beans as the house pour for equipment demos. Burnside is the eighth Oregon location and fits the pattern: this is a Portland coffee company with real distribution now, not a single-roaster cult.

On what is actually in the cup, the current catalog is a better guide than any argument about lineage. The shelf right now runs two Colombian single origins, a Honduran geisha, and blends at both ends of the spectrum: Cartwheel, a mix of washed and natural lots the roaster calls juicy and vibrant, alongside Oro, which they put squarely in chocolate, caramel, and toasted nuts. One of the Colombians comes through what Roseline calls the Picker’s Project, a program aimed at getting farm labor into the economics of the crop. So this is a direct-sourcing operation with a light, fruit-forward top end and a comfortable chocolate-leaning blend underneath it — not the austere Nordic house style it is sometimes described as, and not the Pacific Northwest dark-roast cliche either.

They also run seasonal drinks with more thought than the usual pumpkin-flavored obligation — the salted maple hazelnut latte is the one that gets talked about. Assume a Burnside menu that mirrors the existing cafes: espresso, pour-over by the cup, retail bags, and a rotating seasonal thing that’s actually good rather than merely sweet.

One realistic caveat before you plan a trip: “later this fall” is a permitting-stage estimate, not a date. Cafe build-outs in Portland slip by a month or two routinely. Treat fall as optimistic and winter as likely.

You don’t have to wait until fall

Roseline’s retail bags ship nationally, so the easiest way to find out whether the new cafe is worth your morning is to brew their beans at home first. This site earns a commission on purchases made through the link below, at no extra cost to you.

The bag I’d start with is the Oro Blend, their Colombian house blend and the most representative thing they sell. It’s roasted medium and toasty rather than light — caramelized sugar and dark chocolate up front, with a lemon-shortbread note on the finish that keeps it from going flat. That combination makes it forgiving in a way single origins usually aren’t: it holds up as espresso, it doesn’t fall apart if your pour-over runs long, and it survives a splash of milk. If you’re buying one bag to decide whether you like a roaster, buy the one that shows their default judgment. This is that bag.

Buy whole bean and grind it yourself — a blend this sugar-forward loses the shortbread note within a couple of days of being ground, which is exactly the part that makes it interesting.

What I’d actually watch for

An eighth location isn’t a story on its own. What makes this one worth watching is placement: Roseline is betting on a walkable corridor rather than a downtown office tower, at a moment when a lot of Portland coffee real estate decisions are going the other way. If the Burnside cafe works, expect more of Portland’s roasters to keep pushing east into neighborhoods rather than chasing the central city back to life.

We’ll update this post when an opening date is actually announced.

Correction, August 3, 2026: An earlier version of this post described Keith Schuman as a co-founder of Roseline Coffee and implied the roaster has had continuous ownership since its founding. Schuman is a co-owner; he and Matthew Bloch acquired the brand from founder Marty Lopes in 2020, and the company was rebranded afterward. The section on Roseline’s house style has been revised accordingly.