New York Is Finally Taking Its Coffee Seriously (no, this time they really, really, really mean it)
Posted by TheShot on 09 Mar 2010 | Tagged as: Café Society, Consumer Trends, Foreign Brew
A fine line exists between the point where you’ve truly arrived and the point where you’d like everyone else to believe that you’ve truly arrived. It’s analogous to comparing “old money” and “new money.” While old money supposedly maintains a low profile and doesn’t feel the need to prove their status, new money pulls up in a gaudy red sports car, engine revving, stereo blasting, and primping in the rear-view mirror in the hope that the paparazzi will appear.
We get this mental image the more we read about New York City’s nascent coffee culture. From tomorrow’s New York Times: New York Is Finally Taking Its Coffee Seriously – NYTimes.com.
Haven’t we read this all before? We posted on this very topic last June: Fables of the Reconstruction: New Yorkers say their coffee has finally arrived. But the more articles we see coming out of New York professing the city’s readiness for its coffee débutante ball, the more we sense the vibe of a city desperately trying to shake off its coffee inferiority complex.
New York and the Art of Not Knowing What You Don’t Know
The New York Times article cited above offers “The Top 30 Coffee Places in Manhattan and Brooklyn.” Eight years ago, you could count the top coffee places in Manhattan and Brooklyn on one hand, and most of those wouldn’t be worth the trip. Fortunately, things have changed. Though much of it has changed with the influx of coffee cultures from foreign cities — i.e., people and businesses seeking fame and fortune by relocating to what was once a Dubai-like coffee desert.
New Yorkers can be forgiven for their over-earnestness on the matter, as not being the cultural center of the universe for something must leave an identity crisis and deep psychological scars not experienced since the center of the art world shifted from Paris to New York during World War II. But it was just last summer that New York media flipped out over the discovery of laptop zombies, who squat on Wi-Fi connections in coffee shops, as if they were a brand new phenomenon. Meanwhile, a number of SF coffee shops were designed years ago with defenses against laptop zombies already in mind. And while NYC seems elated just to have decent espresso options in town, SF has since moved down Maslow’s Hierarchy of Coffee Needs to entertain cultural oddities such as fetishized coffee shops and espresso hovels that mock their own customers.
As with our recent criticisms of Yountville trying to be a second-rate Provence, New York City has yet to figure out that simple forgery does not make a coffee culture. When New York roasters and cafés start making their way out West — i.e., when New York starts exporting its coffee culture instead of exclusively importing it — only then will they have arrived. Until that happens, any claims about New York being a serious coffee town ring about as authentically hollow as the New York New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas.
7 Comments »
Each time I visit back home I make a point of first stopping into chelsea’s cafe grumpy. Definitely where I had my first nyc coffee epiphany, even if they have their fare share of imported roasts alongside there own. Last time, their shelfs were stocked with Verve and Novo.
Perhaps the coffee/wine analogy finally has a destination in New York. Long being considered a wine happy town, despite neglecting their long island and upstate producers on lists, their coffee too is reliant on import.
Café Grumpy is one of the few real natives of any renown in NYC. Even Gimme!, for comparison (its detractors aside), is itself an import from Ithaca.
Luckily, I moved to New York just this year, when the apparent coffee revolution was really gaining momentum. As an avid coffee lover, I was excited to try out all these new shops in NYC. I’ve actually began blogging some of the shops I’ve been visiting around New York City. I critique everything from the quality of the drinks, to the atmosphere of the shops themselves. Here is a link—
http://www.javahausnyc.blogspot.com
My goal is to keep it updated as much as possible, but as most New Yorkers can sympathize with, my schedule only allows me to travel so much. I’m open to discussion/suggestions, so stop by and leave a comment!
blue bottle was serving pour over with a 20 second pour their first day open, and that’s with the boss in attendance. they spent all that money on the stupid siphons, but no professional roaster.
counter culture tastes like utter shit in new york.
the shop with the slayer? maybe their think coffee background explains the taste?
gimme coffee is indeed a stand out, and stumptown still competes for best cup.
oh, and grumpy, and blue bottle both have to charge $2.50 minimum for a cup. that’s outrageous.
I’ve tried quite a few of the places cited in the NY Times article, at least the Manhattan ones. It will take me a while to get to many of the Brooklyn ones…
Here are a few of my observations on the current NYC scene:
1. Ultra-ristretto pulls. I always prefer ristretto, but at places like Cafe Grumpy and Ninth Avenue Espresso, it can reach the absurd—just a thimbleful. To be fair, they dial in their blends for this, so it’s nicely balanced at that concentration, but it seems really silly and precious to me. One of those “we are so sophisticated” things. Would that be ristrettissimo?
2. Barista tattoos. The NYC baristas seem to be in competition with the bike messengers for covering all visible real estate, including necks and backs of hands, but not yet faces.
3. Bottomless portafilters. In CT and RI, the baristas seem to be crazy for these in the last few months. They claim there is undesirable carmelization of the pull when it hits the hot spout of the portafilter, and claim it is sweeter straight from the basket. I honestly can’t taste any difference, but it gives them something to enthuse and obsess about.
4. Yellow-colored Nuova Point Milano cups. Or that kind of mango color. Now I know why these are unavailable to us mere mortals—-the NYC coffee shops seem to have bought out the entire world supply. They use them for cappuccinos and “flat whites” (small lattes). They all have them.
Life is a carnival…
It’s always interesting to hear how locals interpret the local coffee culture — since many are often so different. NYC’s is going through a lot of changes, so it’s helpful to hear about it from someone in the middle of it.
Some thoughts for each point:
1. We are admittedly some of the few who actually like the thimble-sized ristretto once in a while. We also like the intensity of aged balsamic, so that’s probably not a stretch.
2. Aren’t barista tattoos standard issue everywhere in America? Kind of like Chotchkie’s requiring employees to wear a minimum of 15 pieces of flair in the movie Office Space?
3. Interesting that they’re still promoting naked portafilter shots. 49th Parallel Roasters barista Barrett Tyler Jones wrote a good article last month looking back at five years of naked portafilter hype: The Grind: Assessing the need to go bottomless – The Appetizer.
4. There are a few places that use the yellow Nuova Point cups out here, but not many.
But what is funny about flat whites is that we share an ocean with those guys, but you can almost never find a flat white out here on the (eastern) Pacific Coast. Which leads us to suspect that the flat white arrived in New York by way of London.
Thanks for the interesting comments.
So..I also have a blog, which is pretty much paired down to a google map of places with good coffee – nycguideforcoffeesnobs.com