A Coffee Odyssey, Discovering coffee and the GS3 on a sunny day at the end of May in NYC.
On Memorial Day afternoon, as tourists clumped together on the sidewalks under a warm sun, I ducked into the High Line Hotel. Looming over the corner of Twentieth Street and Tenth Avenue, the hotel, which was once the dormitory for The General Theological Seminary, did not seem particularly inviting, despite the white banners declaring it “open.” (A Google search for “High Line Hotel” still directed me to The Standard, many blocks away.) I was looking for the greatly hyped inaugural New York City outpost of the Chicago-based Intelligentsia Coffee.
The whirring of a coffee grinder led me past carefully faded rugs that lined the tile floor of the small lobby to a bar tucked in the back left corner of a room. (The only seating around is a single sofa located back in the hotel lobby.) Cool and dark, the Intelligentsia space felt more like a steakhouse than a coffee shop. I was practically alone when I ordered the Sugar Glider espresso, a seasonal offering, for $3.50. Served by a quiet man as gray as his newsboy cap, my drink was, true to its name, sweet at first. Then it fell flat, tasting almost papery. I perhaps should have ordered, for four dollars, a coffee from Los Inmortales, El Salvador, brewed with a device called the Kalita Wave, or a cold-brew coffee, which is made by steeping coffee grounds for twelve hours or more in water that is room temperature or cooler, from Matalapa, El Salvador. The barista perked up considerably when I asked about the pastries. (You should definitely have a pastry.) I passed on a chocolate chip cookie that consisted of as much chocolate as dough for the “mah-ze-dahr,” a soft, blondie-style bar with walnuts, chocolate, and coconut. I ate this while I watched an older man pose for a picture with his demitasse in front of the espresso machine. He was one of a handful of patrons to saunter through in the fifteen or twenty minutes I spent at the shop. As I walked out into the sun, a gaggle of tourists wearing name tags squeezed through the doors of the hotel.
I strolled down to West Eighth Street, which hosts a surprising number of vacant storefronts for a busy street. One of them, halfway between Sixth Avenue and Fifth Avenue, formerly the Eighth Street Bookshop, has been transformed into a new cafe from Stumptown, the Portland-based coffee company that is another poster child for the progressive coffee movement. The space is open, bright, and, with two identical sets of cash registers, menus, and espresso machines, designed to be busy. It was. A long line of people were pressed against the back wall; I feared it was the line for the brew bar, which exists to highlight single-origin coffees with a variety of different brewing methods, but it was just a Starbucks-length bathroom line. The brew bar was hidden just beyond, like some kind of coffee speakeasy.
In the brew bar, which has nowhere to sit or to lean, a long, low counter holds an array of brewing equipment, like troops ready to march: a pair of bulbs for siphon brewing, a compact GS3 espresso machine for pulling single origin shots, gooseneck kettles, beautiful Bee House drippers, and Chemex brewers. The only iced offering, besides the on-tap cold brew, was an iced Americano, made with Stumptown’s Ethiopia Yirgacheffe Chelba espresso, which I ordered. (I was hoping for an ice brew, in which hot coffee is brewed directly over ice. Done well, it tastes like summer. But another barista said he had only been “toying” with making ice brew in an Aeropress; he wasn’t comfortable serving it to me.) The iced Americano was pleasant enough, but did not exactly sparkle. The on-tap cold brew, pressed upon me by a cheerful barista, however, was syrupy and sweet, and would be a perfect summer sipper with a few melting ice cubes in it. I wasn’t sure where I should linger, though, so I left immediately after a conversation with an acquaintance I bumped into.
A few hours later, I wound up at the Lower East Side location of New York’s own Cafe Grumpy, which has slowly grown into a mini-chain over the last few years. (It will open a location near Times Square soon.) The store is a small, shaded box with a pair of stools in front of the espresso machine, and a red bike leaning against the wall. Frank Ocean’s “channel ORANGE” was playing, from beginning to end, and the place smelled strongly of mint tea. The shot I ordered, from the Yukro co-op in Ethiopia, was the espresso I had been looking for—bright, sweet, and clean—in the kind of coffee shop I had wanted to sit in all day.
“The New Yorker”
posted by Matt Buchanan