It's mostly new cafés, and a fortune
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Oh charlie, don’t you want to get your espresso machine fixed?
Head on down to Variety Coffee in Bushwick (146 Wyckoff Ave.), right off the Dekalb Ave. L Train stop to get your coffee equipment fixed for free!
In fact, get whatever you want fixed! Who cares!
Pretty neat.
10–3pm and yes you really can get clocks, microwaves, etc. fixed.
New Cafés/etc.
☕️✅, or Coffee Check, is open in Greenpoint. Soon they will be roasting their own beans, but for now it’s a mix of other roasters and some single origin pourovers. They are tax and tip included, so a flavored latte comes out to $6. Nice. They are also a photography studio, with a podcast booth and full kitchen in the back for content creators. And they have a ⭐5.0 on google maps.
“UnD” in Greenpoint is open near the Greenpoint Ave G stop, created by a wife/husband and a friend who met them abroad while studying. After a few years living in NYC, they found out they were in the same neighborhood and created a coffee shop, where the concept is that they are undoing the norm. The coffee shop can be seen with marketing like “UN(COFFEE STUDIO)D” and “UN(ADULTERATE)D”. I don’t know.
Overflow coffee in LIC recently opened. I can’t see their coffee bags on gmaps, but I hear the coffee is decent. The name seems to be a cheeky attack on “Overflow to the city”, which is LIC.
Luckee Duckee’s also opened in LIC, and it’s a kid-forward design with coffee, boba, gelato, onigiri, salads, sandwiches, and more.
Caffeine Cabana Coffee in Sunnyside. Seemingly in a place I was helping build a coffee concept in last year and they gave up on the project. Maybe they started up again in a different direction? Unlikely.
Barako Cafe in Woodside—seems like a passion project, and they have 4 kinds of affogatos. I’m sold.
recess grove in Williamsburg—an art café
Luna La Mer, Park Slope
Not yet on Google, The Duo Coffee Bar in flushing is soft opening hard, and is showing off a pretty interesting menu. A lot of these new cafés, like this one, come to this newsletter through Coffee Klatsch’s research, which runs free klatchs every Wednesday for coffee aficionados here in NYC.
Haraz Coffee House—a gorgeous, deeply middle eastern coffee house in west SoHo/villageish. It has a lot of similar design elements to Qahwah House.
A-Frame Cafe—you’ll never guess this, but this is built with an A-Frame. Wow. The coffee is sold in triangular boxes, too. Something about mountains. SoHo.
mika’s direction—what is this place? Where am I? Who is Mika? It’s Murray Hill and I am not sure what they are doing here except at least coffee and match and ice cream.
Ninepin Cafe in midtown, near the Museum of Sex above Union Square.
Another MOKAFÉ in midtown.
Kaafi by Chaiguy above Central Park. I don’t know much about this place except that this is a Pakistani Chai & Coffee house and it looked good on Instagram. I’d enjoy a good chai place.
Café Colmado is the new kid on the block, a café in lower manhattan, apparently serving forgotten forest coffee.
Tall Poppy in lower midtown is open, and is a pretty cool looking bakery.
Chaotic Good Café in UWS, high-specialty coffees and games [board, card, ttrpg, etc.].
Pop-ups
Guided Liberica tasting at “City Boy Coffee” Nov 3. RSVP only thru coffee klatsch (from whom a lot of these new cafés/pop-ups are known).
Also Nov 3, at the ‘new’ ornithology café, coffee and jazz with a Hawa Matcha pop-up
Break time!
During a long walk from tip to tip in Manhattan, I drank a lot of coffee. Even more a few days later when I walked around Harlem, exploring whatever the people I asked told me to. I found a wheat field, a huge booming church [that was not the source of the bells I was following], a college coffee shop, a BBQ joint hidden in a bridge, a street fair, an overpriced bakery, and a downpour.
I also got to see a small circle of life, knowing that the tip to tip Manhattan walk isn’t just a light jaunt through the city, but a recollection of the places you love, and the very last chance you can try the places you’ve always wanted to. It’s as much a farewell tour as it is a reminiscence of the beginning and end of you in New York. It reminds you of when you were trying out Katz for the first time, moving about Times Square looking for ‘good pizza’, caught in the subway—because you hit up Katz, push your way through tourists, and help someone else caught and lost.
And it can show you how much you’ve changed. I will, if I’m lucky, get to walk Manhattan if I decide to leave again, and I hope that I can get something new out of it, and old. As is always with metaphor, it includes a manifestation:
And now…
This week’s coffee shop spotlight!
This is one of the best recipes I’ve seen in a long time, outside of the Korean and Japanese innovations happening in Flushing.
An utter classic, an instant eternal item, the ‘rites of spring’ is a red tea, vanilla, orange, and lemon.
It is a sweet, perfectly balanced drink, with sugar to balance bitter and acidity to balance sugar, and bitter therego.
It’s easy enough to make; just make sure that the acidity you’re using isn’t too much, and you mix it with the vanilla first prior to adding milk.
The place, Dear Mama in Harlem, is celebrating their 8 year anniversary this year. Go and enjoy a coffee and a lot of stressed college kids. Here’s the place:
Recipe of the week: Chai #2
I am working on a chai recipe, and also working towards/retrospectively a recipe shown to me by someone who took their time making chai. I made it, forgot, and am now adding my own spin and knowledge to a half-remembered recipe until I get a delicious chai you can make at home, no steps skipped.
There are things to be done easily, and for those chais just buy a chai mix and mix it with milk.
I recommend Sattwa chai, if you can get any, Dona chai if you like a standard spicy-yet-non-offensive chai, Maya if you like it punchy [and cheap!], kilogram chai if you like an interesting, dynamic chai [you can try it at Gasoline Alley], and five sparrows if you can find it [it’s a Montana brand], although I haven’t had it in a long long time.
Then, there are things to be done slowly, like watching a river and waiting for Godot.
Here is that chai. Iteration #2.
Go nuts!
The idea is that you toast the spices, infuse the water with the spices, then add the tea and infuse that + spices, then add the milk and infuse that + the rest, and then froth the milk.
This particular recipe for chai condenses 5 cups of liquid into about 2 total cups at the end, making it extremely heavy and creamy. And luxurious, like a plush carpet.
Thanks for tuning in!
Enjoy your coffee!
Making your own chai is next level! Interesting recipe