Ninja Luxe Café Pro ES701UK: what it adds to the Premier

The Premier plus two things

If you have read our page on the Luxe Café Premier ES601, most of this machine is familiar. Both list espresso, a filter coffee function and a cold brew function; both grind on conical burrs with 25 settings; both have scales built in, so the dose is measured by weight as it is ground; both supply 3 baskets, single, double and Luxe.

Ninja’s information adds two things on the Pro:

	Luxe Café Pro ES701	Luxe Café Premier ES601
Tamping	integrated lever tamper	assisted tamper, per Ninja’s range table
Froth presets	5, including cold foam	4
UK price bracket	Premium	Upper mid-range

The lever tamper takes the last manual step of puck preparation off your hands. The fifth preset, cold foam, is for iced drinks; if nobody at home drinks them, it adds nothing. That is the whole case for the step up, and the bracket above is what it costs.

Three styles, one machine

The reason to buy either Ninja is the range. One person wants a flat white, another a mug of filter coffee, a third cold brew: the two Luxe Café models are the only espresso machines in our UK database that list all three. The Sage machines in the same price territory, the Barista Pro and the Barista Express, make espresso and steam milk by hand, nothing else.

Ninja counts its menu in drink settings rather than drinks: 25 in the descriptive text of its UK page and 29 in the range table of the same page, combining espresso styles, coffee styles, sizes and froths. Because these are settings rather than programmed drinks, we enter no drinks figure.

Grind, dose and tamp done for you

Twenty-five steps on the grinder put the Ninja between the two Sage all-in-ones:

• Sage the Barista Pro (SES878)30
• Ninja Luxe Café Pro Series (ES701UK)25
• Sage the Barista Express (SES875)16
• De'Longhi La Specialista Arte Manual espresso maker EC9155.MB15

More steps mean finer adjustment, not a more even grind; evenness can only be measured, and we have not measured it. What sets the Ninjas apart is how much they take on: the scales weigh the dose, and on the Pro the lever tamps it. On the Sages you dose and tamp yourself. If those are the two variables you would rather not learn, our grind size guide shows what you are handing over.

The milk side follows the same logic. An automatic frother with 5 presets replaces the steam wand; you fill a jug and pour, but you do not texture by hand.

The blanks on the sheet

Read as a conventional espresso machine, the Pro’s sheet has more gaps than the Premier’s. Ninja’s UK, German and French pages give no water tank capacity, no bean hopper capacity, no pump pressure, no portafilter diameter, no basket type and no heating system. We have not read the ES701 manual, which might fill some of them; until then our table shows not stated.

In practice: if you plan to buy third-party baskets or a different tamper, the data cannot tell you what fits. If you need to know how many mugs of filter coffee one tank gives, the data cannot tell you that either.

What Ninja does state that the Premier’s sources left open is power: 1,650 W on the UK page.

Size, weight and UK model numbers

Ninja gives 35.1 cm of width, 33.3 cm of depth and 37.1 cm of height on its German and UK pages; the French page gives slightly different figures, which we have not used. The weight is 11.56 kg on the same two pages; the 17.25 kg on the French page is probably the boxed weight. Within a few millimetres and grams, that is the Premier’s footprint: a machine for a permanent place, not a cupboard.

In the UK it is sold as the Luxe Café Pro Series ES701UK, in black and steel, with further colour references ES701UKWH, ES701UKBR and ES701UKGNGD. Ninja’s UK page states a 2 years-year warranty.

Where to go next

All the espresso machines with a built-in grinder are set side by side in espresso machines with a grinder, and the espresso machine comparison covers the whole category. The Barista Express vs Ninja Luxe Café head-to-head sets out the guided-against-manual choice line by line, and most of it applies to the Pro too.

Not sure a portafilter machine suits the way you drink coffee? The machine finder starts from your habits, and the cost-per-cup calculator works out what beans cost you per cup. Noise is unpublished for this machine; we plan to measure it.