Coffee Shops – NYC Style

With vaccinations rolling out, I have started to think about things that have been relegated to a dusty corner of my mind for the past year, especially travel. First introduced to its magic by my mother in 1980, NYC has always called me back. Since the 1990s, I have returned to the city several times a year. At first, I would stay in super cheap budget hotels like the Carlton Arms, Herald Square Hotel, and Hotel 17 (back when they were still super cheap). After the turn of the millennium, I largely shifted to a variety of hostels of varying degrees of legality.

However, my favorite places to eat in the city have remained constant: coffee shops.

Coffee shops are distinct from diners, cafés, chain coffee joints, and any other type of dining establishment. Too many coffee shops have long since closed, but when I happen upon one it’s a discovery of sheer delight. While diners are often outfitted in chrome and stainless, with shiny refurbished or neo-retro furnishings, a menu as long as a book, gargantuan servings, and can be quite spendy ($16-$18 for pancakes), a café has either a limited or no kitchen, is outfitted with a glistening and hissing proper espresso machine, and serves sandwiches, baked goods, and other light bites.

I am surely thankful for a recognizable corporate chain like Starbucks to buy a bottle of water and score the secret restroom code when I can’t find a swanky hotel nearby to confidently walk in like a registered guest for the facilities. But for a coffee and a quick bite, I'd choose a place with character like Caffé Dante or Reggio in Greenwich Village.

A coffee shop has kept the same furnishings and fixtures for decades. It's usually a small, cozy place tucked unobtrusively into the block, usually one room, or maybe a few small rooms, interconnected, and is often lined with a counter. The menu may still be typed, but if there’s evidence of Wite-out™ adjusted prices you know you’ve hit the real thing.

The place looks like (and likely has) been there since the 40s. Sometimes the prices—a place like Joe Jr., for example—haven't been updated in ages. It's cheap, with reliably decent coffee served and frequently refilled from the glass pots of a Bunn coffeemaker, and you can order a plate like a tuna melt or a cheeseburger or two eggs with toast for a few bucks. There's always some sort of "dieters delight" section, where you can get a scoop of cottage cheese with a pineapple ring, an iceberg salad, or a grilled chicken breast with tomato slices.

Coffee shops often still exist only if the proprietors own the property and the business been there for decades. They may have erroneously named themselves "diner" (like the recently closed Lyric Diner) or "restaurant," but they are, most definitely, still coffee shops.

My love for coffee shops has a personal and decidedly non-New York origin.

I grew up in a family who owned three bowling alleys in the San Francisco Bay Area, and I vividly remember the small wood-paneled coffee shop tucked into the corner of Sunnyvale Bowl. The rhythmic sounds of pins cracking provided the soundtrack for our family Sunday breakfasts in the 1970s.

Those bowls are long gone now, of course. But the coffee shops, and the way they linger in my mind, are a vestige of a time long passed.

What delights me is the rare occasion when I happen upon one in our travels, especially in NYC or my home turf, the Bay Area. I have a collection of small-printed coffee shop to-go menus from past decades stashed in the bottom left drawer of my bankers’ desk that I take out, every once in a while, wistfully reflecting on travels past. My mind never lingers on the monuments or the tourist spots but instead on the small anachronisms I was fortunate to happen upon along the way.

Sadly, but  not surprisingly, most coffee shops are gone now. But it feels good to know that in a handful of lucky places out there, a few well-worn but precious gems fired up the antique griddle and put on the coffee this morning. 

I take that as a small, but wondrous, gift.

G. L. Ercolini is an academic, educator, record collector, avid hiker, drummer in local bands, and spends most of her time plotting the next travel caper.