There is a wall at Resonate Coffee's Katipunan branch that displays the time in two places: Katipunan and Marikina. They are, obviously, the same time zone. It is a joke, and it is also the single most accurate thing anyone has said about this shop, because the whole reason Resonate is worth writing about a second time is that it now exists in two rooms at once, and the two rooms disagree with each other in ways that turn out to be interesting.
We already ran a full spotlight on Resonate last month, covering the address, the founding, the Dirty Flan, and the cyclists, and I am not going to repeat all of that here. If you want the basics, that piece is still the place to start. This one is about the two things that piece did not have room for: how Wilbert Morada and Lorenz Santos actually build the drinks, and what changes when you drink them in Marikina Heights versus on the second floor of a building along Katipunan Avenue.
Two rooms, one stubborn idea
The mistake I would have made writing this blind is assuming the Marikina branch is the cozy one and Katipunan is the industrial one. That is not it. Both are raw on purpose. The pair gravitate toward Brutalist design, all rawness and ruggedness, and their first Marikina shop already has the unfinished look, most visibly in cement-finish walls where patches of white putty are still showing. Nobody forgot to sand those. That is the finish.
Katipunan is what happens when they stop being subtle about it. The second branch, which opened in November 2024 on the second floor at 318 Katipunan Avenue in Loyola Heights, is built to look like a hardware store, and the detail I keep coming back to is that it was an accident. The renovation was nearly finished when they visited and found the contractor packing up his things. As Lorenz tells it in MyBoysen's write-up of the space, he said, wag mo kayang tapon 'yan, sayang, gamitin na lang namin. Do not throw that away. Let us just use it. So workers' benches were sanded down, clear-coated and turned into cafe furniture. Heavy-duty plastic storage boxes became coffee tables. Empty cement sacks got filled with coffee beans and became decor. A custom sign reading Resonate Hardware & Coffee Supplies now sits above a tall wooden shelf on the back wall, punctuated at either end by empty paint cans, because that is what a Filipino pictures when they picture a hardware store.
The design press has caught on. BluPrint noted the exposed concrete ceiling and orange piping and quoted Lorenz on the founding question of the whole room, what if we do not refinish it and leave it as is, and Spin.ph filed it under a blue-collared estetik, tables sourced from construction sites and karinderyas, cement bags parked under them. The thing I like about it, and the reason it does not read as costume, is that nobody has to dress up to sit in it. A room finished in salvaged bench and paint can is a room with no dress code.
How the drinks are actually built
Underneath both rooms is one menu philosophy, and it is narrower than the decor suggests. Resonate roasts on site and runs an espresso base built on beans from Brazil and Ethiopia, and Wilbert is direct about why that matters to him: the goal is for more people to know what they are drinking, to taste what coffee from Brazil is like next to coffee from Ethiopia or Kenya. That is a teaching menu, not a trend menu. Our roast levels guide covers what you are actually tasting when you make that comparison, and our specialty coffee guide explains why in-house roasting is the dividing line it is, one Resonate shares with only a handful of shops citywide like Franken Coffee Bar + Roastery.
What that produces is a signature list that reads like dessert but is engineered around the coffee rather than around syrup. The Dirty Flan, around 200 pesos, is their own take on an affogato, leche flan sweetness cut against a shot pulled from their Champagnat blend, which is a very different proposition from a caramel pump. The Buttercookieccino, about 170 pesos, does the butter-cookie thing. Elsewhere on the list there is a Blueberry Cherry Americano and a Honey Lemon Americano, both of which are the tell of a shop that knows its lighter roasts have fruit and acid in them and would rather lean into that than bury it under milk. Katipunan has pushed further, with an apple pie drink, a spiced latte people keep recommending, and a couple of limited-run drinks, Delilah and Boshi, that did well enough to earn permanent places on that branch's menu. If you want to see how these sit against the rest of the city, our ranked drinks guide is the wider map, and the taste-based guide will point you at the right one for your palate.
Lorenz says the order of operations was deliberate: sa simula, kinalimutan muna namin yung vibes nung shop, focus namin ay sa menu, gusto namin na babalik sila dahil, uy, okay yung coffee. At the start we forgot about the vibe and focused on the menu, so people would come back because the coffee was good. Given that they now run the most photographed hardware store in Quezon City, that is a slightly funny thing to have said. It also appears to have worked in the right order, which is the rarer outcome.
What people actually say
Resonate sits at 4.8 out of 5 on Google, and the striking thing is how boring the praise is, in the best sense. The words that repeat are not viral. They are amazing coffee and food, friendly and knowledgeable staff, reasonable prices, fast service, good atmosphere. Reviewers mention watching the baristas work the rectangular bar counter as part of what they enjoyed, which is a specific pleasure you only get at a shop where the bar is the stage rather than a wall.
At Katipunan the notes run the same way, with more character to them. People call it not your usual cafe vibe, a cool layout with tons of character, and single out the spiced latte and the Dirty Flan. One line I liked, on the coffee: the baristas know their coffee. Another, more simply: super sarap. The staff get called super nice more or less constantly. Lorenz has noticed the shift from the other side of the counter too, saying that customers used to rarely ask what coffee was in the machine, and now they ask all the time. For a shop whose stated purpose is getting people curious about what they are drinking, that is the metric that actually counts.
Which branch should you go to?
Honestly, it depends on what you want from the afternoon, and the differences are real but not dramatic. Marikina Heights is the smaller, more neighborhood one, roughly a dozen to fifteen seats inside plus an outdoor area, dog-friendly, and it is the branch with the local cycling crowd and the spinach croissant that people specifically travel east for. It is not a place to camp with a laptop for six hours, and I do not think it wants to be. Katipunan is the bigger swing: more space, outlets, a student and young professional crowd, occasional artist and business events, and the branch bestseller is not even a drink, it is the spicy peanut noodles at around 220 pesos. Prices on the core signature drinks track closely between the two, so this is not a case of one branch quietly charging a premium for the same cup.
If you have never been to either, I would go to Marikina Heights first, order a black brewed coffee before you order anything sweet, and then order the Dirty Flan anyway. The black cup tells you what the roast is doing; the Dirty Flan tells you what they think is fun. You need both readings to understand the place. The full listing is here if you want the map link, and our Marikina Heights guide covers the three other shops within walking distance if you are making an afternoon of it.
The honest limits of this write-up
Everything above comes from the owners' own interviews, published write-ups, and what visitors have said in public. I have not sat in either room, and I am not going to write as though I have, because the one thing this directory has that an aggregator does not is that it tells you where its information stops. So the gaps are real ones: I do not have a full current price list for either branch, prices move, and menus at a shop that runs limited drinks move faster than any listing can. Hours are on their own pages, which is the only source I would trust on a given day. Parking at Katipunan is limited, which matters more than it sounds when the shop is on a second floor along that stretch of avenue.
Which is where you come in, same as every month. If you have been to both, the thing I most want to know is whether the coffee actually tastes the same in the two rooms, because that is the question no amount of research can answer and the one that would tell you the most about how well a small independent scales. Leave a review on their listing here and settle it for the next person.
The usual disclosure, because it gets said every month: we picked Resonate ourselves, researched this from public sources, and nobody paid for this write-up. Resonate now runs two branches, one in Marikina and one in Quezon City, and that is worth naming plainly given this directory only features shops that are genuinely independent and originally from Marikina. A second branch across the city is the good version of that story, not an exception to it. If you run a Marikina shop and want to talk about a feature or a collaboration, the disclaimer page has how to reach us, and if a detail here is wrong or out of date, send it the same way and we will fix it.