Six more reasons to envy New Yorkers.
Gimme! Coffee, Brooklyn, NY
Just to be clear, Oliver is the person who decided it would be funny to get me really really addicted to coffee. I hope he’s satisfied. (I guess it’s only fair revenge on me for introducing him to the internet.) In any case, although my parents had their hand in it, allowing me to join in on the stuff when I was only a little kid, it’s Oliver’s fault that I am now in the condition where I just pour out bad stuff, arrange errands around crossing paths with a nice espresso, and have a Flickr page that outs me as somewhat of a weirdo.
Thus it is at his request that I will tell you places you can go and drink coffee if you go to New York City!
Joe—The Art of Coffee
Joe has kind of been my favourite this year over the course of several trips to the city. It has a really stupid name. Possibly it speaks to the more upscale West Village crowd they’re catering to, but I’m embarrassed every time I have to try and say that em dash out loud. That said, their cafe on Waverly Place is a splendid little joint: bright and cheery without being quaint, a bustling mix of easy-to-work-at tables (including two coveted window seats) wireless internet streaming in from the neighbours, and supposedly Amy Sedaris makes the cupcakes they serve, though I’m always a little too embarrassed to get them to confirm or deny this. The coffee is consistently great: Barrington Coffee Roasting Company beans at the hand of a pile of friendly baristi who make nice art and aren’t a little sassy. Joe is a great place to spend an afternoon, or just grab what you know will be a wonderful coffee when you’re near W4 St. or even at their humbler second location off of Union Square. (Apparently they just opened in the Alessi store, too, but the plebian in me wishes they’d open up in Penn Station or something.)
Joe—the Art of Coffee, Waverly Place
Ninth Street Espresso
You want views of willow trees, stupid East Village bootwear, cadres of people that look like they truly need it lining up for really strong espresso? Come here! The coffee is amazing! The only thing about Ninth Street is it’s a little far out there—but that’s only spoken by my lazy voice. It’s totally worth crossing Avenue C for. The atmosphere is more utilitarian than lingery…but you didn’t come to linger, right? Also, everyone who works here seems extremely excited about coffee.
Blue Spoon Coffee Company
This place is startlingly cozy for Chambers Street, but makes no pretensions about catering to the business crowd, and as such it’s a little more brisk and basic than most of the other places I’ve been to in the city. If you’re looking for good coffee below Canal, this is it for you: skillfully presented Black Cat from Chicago’s massive Intelligentsia roastery. But, all hometown loyalty aside, Black Cat has never struck me as truly special—mostly functional. Good, but functional. (Someday when people actually let me become more of a food writer, I’ll expand my vocabulary of beverage descriptors to things more illustrative than “it had a functional aroma”.) It was totally nice, but the best thing about going to Blue Spoon was accidentally running into my friend Ben on his way to work.
Gimme! Coffee
Gimme! roasts and serves excellent coffee, no two ways about it. The only thing is if you want to have some in New York you have to go to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, which is a bummer. It also means the Brooklyn cafe is full of Williamsburg people, and it is also crowded, because though there are supposedly something like 4,889,201 coffee shops in Williamsburg, many of them have figured out that Gimme! is fantastic, and they come and crowd the pleasant booths and sit in the creepy hipster eggshell space chairs. It’s okay, though. You can sit facing away from the eggshell space chairs. I’ve been to Gimme! in Ithaca, too—and the Brooklyn store seems way cleaner! I’m going to risk partisanship and say that if I were in Wililamsburg I’d just keep walking to Greenpoint so I could go to…
Cafe Grumpy
So orange! So cozy! So perfectly lit and kind of awesomely getting everything right. Big wooden corner table to spread your New York Times all over and make chitchat with nice people. Wireless internet. A front room for drinking coffee and getting work done and a back room for looking at artwork and sitting close to your friends on the couch. Exceptionally friendly baristi. Exceptionally good coffee—Counter Culture and Ecco, possibly the Ecco is only at the Manhattan store—and name notwithstanding, a sense of warmth and personality that pervades the whole room. And though the Greenpoint shop (tucked away, just like a neighbourhood place should be, on a mild-mannered corner of Meserole Ave.) is exactly the kind of place I’d make a home away from home, their newest store in Chelsea is exactly the kind of place anyone in Manhattan should be stopping in on as often as they can. It’s spare, and new, and when I was there they didn’t have enough chairs, and the lighting was flickering, but—you know what they had? The best macchiato I’ve ever had. And a coffee bar full of baristi from other cafes all excited to come down and check out the newest spot in town, offer encouragement, paw over the two! wildly expensive and fancy single-cup drip coffee Clover machines, and just generally be part of a thriving and inclusive coffee scene the likes of which I hope we someday have in Toronto. While I was in there I overheard the gaggle of coffee people talking about the inter-cafe kickball tournament between Ninth Street, Gimme!, Grumpy, Joe and Park Slope’s Gorilla. HOW COOL IS THAT.
Cafe Grumpy Chelsea
Cafe Collage
…and while I was drinking my coffee on the street outside Cafe Grumpy Chelsea (because they didn’t have enough seats, and besides it was 63 degrees in November) a friendly Argentinian gentleman leaving the cafe stopped to ask me how I was enjoying my drink. And, like everyone else I’d encountered at the finest NYC cafes, told me to go to every coffee shop I’ve mentioned in the above list. But he also mentioned a new one that I hadn’t heard of yet, Cafe Collage, on Bleecker Street and Macdougal. He told me it was bafflingly spacious, and that they were serving Black Cat, and that it was worth a visit. He was right—and though I kind of didn’t even really want coffee that badly when I walked in the door, the sight of a perfect cappuccino being served up to someone else turned me right around. I made small talk with Kyle, who if he didn’t seem perfectly content to be working at Cafe Collage I would have picked him up and put him in my pocket and taken him home to Toronto with me, to, oh I dunno, talk about coffee and make snarky comments about silly people with all day long. I had a really really wonderful cappuccino (see, Black Cat? You do have it in you!) while butting into a conversation behind me between another barista and a guy who was all, “Yeah, I played drums on the first Sonic Youth LP….” sitting behind me. (Mostly we discussed the relative merits of Lemony Snicket versus Harry Potter with his daughter, but does it get much more New York than that?) It’s a little dark and shiny in here—kind of reminds me of a place I would have done my studying in college—but it’s new! It’s great! It’s friendly and the coffee is good!
Now all the people who live in Williamsburg, people who actually know about coffee and people who have broader descriptive vocabularies than I can all write comments about the broad strokes with which I’ve painted a coffee community in a city in which I don’t even live. But I gotta say: the New York scene is really inspiring, both in terms of entrepreneurialism and taste, and in terms of fostering a sense of locality in a city where often people feel shuffled along like cattle through concrete. That everyone was so mutually supportive and enthusiastic about each others’ cafes (and eager to talk to coffee tourist geeks like me) was really fun, and added another dimension to both my enjoyment of my trips to New York and my enjoyment of the drinks themelves.
These NYC and Bklyn shops are doing it just right, full of the breathy excitement of geeky people building a new scene together, without too much of the cynical competitiveness that would make for just another cranky, snobby moment in what could easily be an endless string of them in anyone’s day (in any city, really.) Maybe that breathy excitement is just palpatations from all the coffee they’re drinking—but if it’s making them do things this good—hey! You should order some, too!