Café-Bar Marzano Review

Lovely cafe with good coffee and nice seating. No table service, go to the bar.

A regular haunt for morning coffee meet-ups with family.....!!

Wide range of excellent food and drinks. Staff are always very helpful and friendly.

Would prefer it if the staff who are handling the food to wear masks or visors atleast and have a better attitude.

thanks to the lovely man who gave me a big glass of water after running in the heat :)

Used to go here regularly before moving away.Nice place to spend time with friends and people watching.

Large coffee shop/bar with indoor and outdoor seating. Very popular and despite usually being busy, the service is always pretty quick. Coffee is good and the opening hours are much better than the competition.

One of the only places I can order a decaf iced latte with non dairy milk, which not only tastes amazing, but I don't feel like the staff hate me for doing it. They might do. But they never show it.

Too much syrup added to my cappuccino, making it overly sickly to drink. Not the first time it's happened.
I normally enjoy the food, but today the coffee put me off eating my food.

Hot drinks are not that hot but ideal for vegan cakes

Friendly and helpful staff. Some different food on offer compared to other cafes but more choices of food should be available for the size of the cafe. The service is also slow.

A perfect place to meet friends and enjoy warm drink while overlooking the nice church view or Norwich library. Just a pleasant place to relax in the morning or evening.

Awesome place to work, lovely staff and loads of tables! The amount of space and proximity of the cafe to everything in the centre of norwich makes it the complete package. I recommend the cookies, they are delicious.

Poor internet (15/0.9Mbps) but decent coffee. Large, fairly busy cafe with plenty of seating in the same building as the BBC

Lots of indoor and outdoor seating and loads of food and drink options, and the staff are friendly. The queue often takes 10 minutes or so, though.

Pleasant and modern, cafe in iconic building. Seating indoors and outdoors with excellent views of St Peter Mancroft Church.

Busy central location. Great meeting place with friendly staff :0)

Nice place. Great seating outside when sunny. Next to tourist information.

Well situated cafe in the heart of the city. It's a great place for meeting people and having a drink, can often be difficult to sit down at peak times though. The Staff are always lovely and exceptionally helpful. The coffee portions are small but tasty and the selection of cakes are disappointingly predictable, a wider selection would set it apart somewhat.

Always love this place! Without fail, genuinely helpful and efficient service, great selection of food, hot and cold beverages, a bar selling alcohol and lots of seating. As a bonus, they also close quite late, so a great place to meet up with friends or just grab a cuppa xx

Really good coffee and food. Great service and plenty of seating indoors and out

Great option after taking your books from the library or visiting BBC

Very convenient location at the Forum. Cakes and hot chocolate not as good as at Starbucks though and I feel like they're even more expensive.

Good for chilling out in the sunshine watching the world go past

Good range of drinks in really nice setting. Plenty of seating.

Absolutely love this place, it s open late so I can go after work and have a nice hot chocolate and slice of cake

When I attended my London conservatoire to study piano, people tended to rather raise their eyebrows when I said I had moved from Norfolk.

(Alhough I'm actually French-Scottish by ancestry. My ancestors appear to have accidentally quietly instigated the invasion of England in 1066. I do apologise. It was a waste of time. You cannot grow decent wine here and it rains during Wimbledon, where I favour the womyn's game. So we largely left for the New World, as shall I.)

Norfolk is strictly for shooting, they said. And of course, Sandringham is nice during the show.

"I have no need to shoot anyone," I would riposte. "And Sandringham seem to largely consist of some old furniture and some giant vegetables. Get with the times."

I had fallen out with the current Royal family anyway, merely by playing Chopin's Revolutionary Etude appallingly at a competition then asking Ruth, Lady Fermoy where the sausage rolls were at a buffet at the actual Fermoy Centre in Bishop's Lynn. (The town has changed name recently, I am told? What care I?)

Lady Fermoy appeared to think I had mistaken her for a waitress. I had merely mistaken her for someone with class. The actual waitresses were lovely. (Her opinion on Chopin was really of no interest. I do not believe she played that particular piece. It was composed to baffle Liszt, and it certainly baffled me, I assure you. Not to mention you need long hair to play it well. I am scarcely a hippy. I am more punk in attitude.)

Anyhow, Marzano is a rather lovely province in Lombardy. Cafe Bar Marzano appeals to people who sport patriarchal beards (beards are for Vikings, bikers, and Victorians) and who buy one coffee then spend all day braying about comics I grew out of in adolescence, videogames I played decades ago, and music that was old hat even in my youth.

I used to visit with an acquaintance who worked remotely there. We were amused that an actual rock star with local connections (who quietly supported my last charity) often sat there surreptitiously reading his newspaper, while many of the various baristas of any gender appeared to act as though they believed they were rock stars. As if! Cryptocurrency, not coffee, is the new rock-n-roll, dude.

(Incidentally, Andy Warhol would have adored Instagram, and those tedious types who repeatedly post boring filtered self-portraits. Old hat, or what? Be creative for once, I always say. And do get over your face. At least spend your 15 minutes of fame being vaguely amusing.)

If you want decent Fair Trade coffee, chocolate, or soft drinks, Marzanos suffices. The wine comes from bottles with screw caps (like me, wine breathes through a cork) and the tea is as insipid as Ed Sheeran. You may also buy decent fresh baguettes and some chocolate cake. (And some other stuff I have no interest in, but you may perhaps favour. Sandwiches, or salads. Little vegan flapjacks. Whatever.)

The free WiFi achieves reasonable speeds, there are comfortable couches, and you can sit outside in the incessant English rain where it is quieter.

However, they have no app to place your order upon, do not have table service, and will be rude to you should you return your cup and plates to the counter as all civilised people of any class do.

After all, I can drink coffee and hang out with diverse people (who don't all look exactly like me) at home. Or I can support more recent immigrants by buying a decent mug of tea from an Albanian on Norwich Market then seeing what's new in the way of Noodles from Hong Kong.

Alan Partridge would love Marzanos and consider it cosmopolitan and sophisticated. I consider it hilarious, but I despise discourtesy in people whose bills are paid by our custom.

The Americans, Scottish, and French understand customer service. Norwich does not. Like Metro Bank who tell me Norwich is 12 years behind London, I am moving North. (I simply cannot keep popping over to Cambridge from Norwich by train every time I need to change notes into pound coins in their retro jukebox. I may as well just bank in London again.)

Au revoir.

Will have to think long and hard before returning. Rude.

Good food, good coffee, needs to clean the sofas outside more often

Always getting my double macchiato from this cafe when spending time at the library

Just a brilliant cafe. Really tasty coffee, great food and a fab selection of beers and gins and everything all served by really great staff

Brilliant coffee and friendly staff. Had a lovely morning and will be back.

Excellent and consistent quality drinks. Perfect hot chocolates

Had a sandwich and a coffee before late Sunday night cinema visit. Not too bad. Not many other places open at 6:30 pm so thumbs up for that!

Expensive and limited menu at times. The food and drinks are not as hot as they could be.

Nice cafe place in the city centre! Coffee not best quality though.

Quick service with plenty of seating.

It can get a bit load but there are some interesting talks held there sometimes.

The coffee is very good here and the selection of hot & cold drinks and light bites is also very good. It's a great place to sit outside on a fine day and watch all that goes on around the forum or cosy up inside on the sofas in colder months. The staff however aren't particularly friendly as I have found on many visits and they often close early.

Excellent fresh food at low prices in a comfortable environment

Decent coffee. Tends to be noisy. Good place to come if you've got slightly raulcous kids, not so great if you haven't.

greaat coffee great service will definatly come back

Had great times here chatting with friends and going to private lessons. Staff are very friendly and helpful.

We were after a cream tea and although they do not specifically offer one, a yummy cream tea was provided for us! Nice atmosphere and great view across to the castle.

Best coffee in Norwich. Lovely staff. Not too loud or busy.

Very rude staff, we purchased food and drink from the cafe and a male staff member (I am a female) came to me and had a go at us for a coke. They sell coke! Not to mention others who literally were sitting there without food and drink did not get this treatment. Normally I love this place and visit frequently but I am very disappointed with the Wednesday staff, no smiles or enthusiasm at all.

Here on Saturday and Sunday with my young daughter and friends - really friendy service - go the extra mile

Amazing coffee and hot chocolate, nice covered seating outside overlooking the forum plain.

Coffee shop in Forum which is in Norwich city centre
Close to market
And main shopping street
Large coffee shop - inside and outside seating
Good choice of coffees, plus cakes etc
Friendly staff

Always a pleasure which at the minute I am missing badly. Lovely place with good staff. Recommended.

Awful staff. I purchased a tea so that I could use their toilet facilities, the original barista told me they had just been cleaned so I couldn't use them. I said no problem, il use the public toilets at the Forum. Unfortunately they were closed. I came back to collect my tea and explain that I really needed to use the toilet facilities and it was the sole purpose I came into the cafe. The second barista ignored me but got her manager. He arrived and rudely confirmed that I could not use the toilets that I could see were perfectly fit for use. The floor was just a bit shiny from the mop. Never have I experienced these kind of people, that was refuse someone the use of toilet facilities when it is so needed. It wouldn't have been such an issue but I am type 2 diabetic and therefore need to use toilet facilities more frequent than perhaps their regular customers. I ended up popping to Pret, purchasing another tea and using the toilet facilities that were open for customers. I assume the barista at Cafe Marzano tipped away my tea.

I enjoyed a lovely, reasonably priced, Americano here. Barista fast & efficient.