Fresh Cup Magazine, providing specialty coffee and tea professionals with unique insight into the trends, ideas, products and people that shape their world.
Issue link: http://freshcup.epubxp.com/i/59523
estled in the far corner of Café Grumpy's Park Slope loca- tion in Brooklyn, owner Caroline Bell and I survey the mid-morning Tuesday crowd of laptop toters and bohe- mian roughnecks. Our seats at the bar are tucked deep into the café space, but deep is relative; it's a 600-square-foot former cloth- ing shop, long and narrow, with orange accents complementing its wood floors and counters. This location was Grumpy's third of what is now four New York City cafés. Its first opened in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood in 2005, making Grumpy a veteran of what some call the third-wave coffee scene. It's a category that has exploded in recent years in New York City, adding a caffeinated dimension to the nickname "the city that never sleeps." As my Grumpy experience unfolds, cafés on the opposite end of the country begin turning over their "Open" signs. Among them is Los Angeles' Handsome Coffee Roasters, which had opened just days earlier. The brainchild of former Intelligentsia Coffee employees, Handsome is a retail-roastery with its headquarters in the formerly industrial, currently revitalizing downtown L.A. "This area has absolutely exploded," Handsome co-owner Mike Phillips tells me later. "There are these gigantic old factories that have been turned into beautiful lofts with huge windows." Los Angeles' specialty coffee culture is also beginning to detonate, as Handsome and other top-tier roasters and retailers are catering to the sprawling metropolis with excellent beans. Similarities between the New York and Los Angeles coffee scenes are undeniable. Both in recent years have had an influx of out-of-town roasters that identified giant, increasingly food- focused populations—New York City's metro area has 22 million people, Los Angeles' 13 million. Both cities have major media mar- kets that have helped publicize the respective growing scenes. And both have tight-knit barista communities whose closeness belies the size of their surroundings. At the same time, New York and Los Angeles have entirely different identities. New York is a city of neighborhoods and heavy foot traf- fic, while being a pedestrian in Los Angeles is likely a losing proposition. Los Angeles has the glitz and glamour of Hollywood; New York has the melting-pot uniqueness that has carried forward since the days of Ellis Island. In many ways, these fast-expanding scenes are setting the new DALLIS BROS. tone of top-quality coffee in America. Here we explore their cof- fee histories and delve into what notes the metropolises are add- ing to the increasingly complex, exciting blend that is American café culture. NEW YORK STORY When Bell opened Grumpy in 2005 with her husband, Chris Timbrell, the city's coffee landscape was entirely different. "There NEW YORK CITY CAFÉ GRUMPY BLUE BOTTLE wasn't much happening, and that's one of the reasons we started," she says. "I just thought, 'Why is it so hard to get something that tastes good?'" Bell and Timbrell chose Greenpoint for the first shop because they lived in the neighborhood, and Grumpy was one of the first shops to use coffee from multiple roasters, a trend that is commonplace now. Other cafés and roasteries starting in New York City around the time of Grumpy's onset, such as Ninth Street Espresso, Joe The Art of Coffee and Gimme Coffee (based in the Upstate town of Ithaca), have also helped form the city's quality identity. continued on page 36 freshcup.com April 2012 35