Cafehop.com — Café hopping in New York City

Now that I’m done laboring on my house, I have free time once again. Last Thursday Mario and I met up for our weekly coffee outing, and this week he wanted to venture east.

The first thing to note, of course, is that Ninth Street Espresso is not on 9th Street, it’s on 13th. The first time I passed it I was worried because I thought I was further south than I actually was. The original is on 13th between Crazy and Dead. Mario and I walked in as we passed by after mistakenly eating at the crumbling, filthy Blue 9 Burger on 3rd. This was Blue 9’s polar opposite: monochrome, clean, bright, and comfortable.

They serve their espresso triple ristretto — you get a little cup 1/3 full with thick, reddish dark coffee. I find this is the way I prefer my espresso. It’s less bitter because it doesn’t extract too much from the beans. Mario disagrees, but what does he know — besides, he’s a terrorist.

We also got a little chocolate petit four thing, and it was gooood. With this, Mario agrees. Even though this place is close to Union Square, it’s not crowded, and conversation can be made in a normal voice.

Ninth Street Espresso, 136 E 13th Street, Manhattan

7am-8pm daily

Mario heard about The Tasting Room from another publication last week, so he recommended we stop by, since we were in the EV anyhow to eat at Momofuku (drool). It’s not in the greatest location for aesthetics – I hate looking at the institutional primary hues of municipal playgrounds — and being more LES than EV, it’s not terribly convenient either. But if you’re an espresso buff, this is your place.

Yeah, it’s $2.50 a pop and the barista takes for, like, ever to serve the coffee, but it’s not without justification. With each order, she put the hopper on the grinder, and ground the beans fresh for our shots. She loaded the grounds and delicately placed small, thick ceramic tazzine under the spouts to catch the syrupy reddish strands of espresso. Then she actually served us at the table, demitasse spoons balanced on the little saucers, water on the side.

I haven’t had better espresso in Manhattan — this place is a close second only to Café al Mercato in The Bronx. It was bursting with a bittersweet orange undertaste I have never experienced, and I think it was all the barista’s doing — she mentioned that she had just been “tinkering with the blend.” She really knew her stuff, and was generous with information about the startlingly gorgeous machine: its origin, who made it, its inner workings and even its cost.

This is a place where a real art is practiced and perfected, and it should not go unnoticed. The warm, diminutive space (which actually seems to be primarily a wine tasting bar) should be a destination for the espresso obsessed.

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The Tasting Room Wine Bar & Cafe, 72 East First Street, Manhattan

Mon-Fri 7am-12am | Sat-Sun 9am-12am

Going to The Bronx’s Little Italy is an adventure. For Italian-Americans in the tri-state area, it’s also a tradition. The neighborhood of Belmont, known simply as “Arthur Avenue” for its main drag, is packed with decades-old stores established to serve the local Italian population early last century. No-nonsense bakeries (bread ONLY) and legendary pastry shops (sweets ONLY) are found on every block. Meat markets display a horror movie’s worth of butchered carcasses in the windows (some still with fur!). Pizza places serve the best pizza in the city (not an exaggeration). And at the Casa della Mozzarella, you can buy magnificent knots of fresh mutz scooped right out of a big bowl of salted water — biting into a fresh chunk sends whey squirting all over the place. You could stock a whole pantry with one visit to the many Italian imports shops.

I’m in love with this place. This is my family’s New York “old country” — my father was baptized at the cathedral on 187th; my great-grandmother paid $75 a month for a 3-bedroom apartment on Crotona Av, just 5 blocks to the east. As much as I would love to go on and on about the neighborhood, this is a blog about cafés and so I’ll cut this short with one exhortation — that you, and every New Yorker, discover this time capsule of this city’s Italian heritage.

The star of the show is the Café al Mercato, a corner stall in the Arthur Avenue Market, built in 1940 by the hamfisted authoritarian LaGuardia administration to give neighborhood street vendors a place to make a living and feed their families. Of course, if they hadn’t been banned from the streets to begin with, the city wouldn’t have had to spend taxpayer money on such a building, but I digress. The café is no-frills — you order your food and coffee at the counter and bring it to your table and consume it. If you get the espresso, do yourself a favor and get a single shot and down it immediately at the counter. For $1.50, you have never had a sweeter, silkier pop of joe.

Plan to spend a sunny summer afternoon here. Stock up on caponata, soppressata, and giant cans of olive oil. Hear some Italian. And if all the shopping bags you will without doubt acquire start to wear you out, stop by the café at the back corner of the Arthur Avenue Market to refuel.

Café al Mercato, Arthur Avenue Market, 2344 Arthur Avenue, The Bronx

Sorry, but one can only gain entrance to the exclusive Cafe 2 by first purchasing a ticket to MoMA. Luckily, Luis’ job gets him free museum tickets for up to 6 companions. So my grandma and her roommate of 15 years, up from Florida babysitting my baby cousin in White Plains, came down to the City to scratch their heads at art with us. The Edvard Munch exhibit was taking up some gratuitously-large- for-Manhattan space on the top floor — you can see the sky through the glass roof! — so we started there. Wandering through the labyrinthine halls of museums gets me cranky real fast — I’m not at all the type to spend a whole day staring at depressing Le Corbusier city plans from the 1920s. So imagine my uncontainable delight at discovering the museum held a slick little bistro-y café right there on the second floor!

We were all having problems ordering from the menu because everything sounded and looked so good — huge glass deli cases hold the colorful food for all to see. Every item in the place, from the tables and benches to the flatware and salt shakers, was designed by what the Cafe 2 website assures me is an important designer.

We each got one of the paninis, which are served with a generous glob of caramelized onions. The sandwiches were the perfect size, had beautiful ingredients, and tasted great with the really good coffee. Here’s the part I’m confused about — is it good that you have to bring your coffee cup up to the refill station to get more? I mean, it’s free, sure…but it seems at best a pain and at worst dangerous to have tens of untrained patrons stumbling through a crowded café with hot coffee sloshing this way and that. Don’t worry, I heroically made it back to the table three times with my coffee, though maybe more of it was in the saucer than stayed in the cup.

Even if you don’t eat, do visit MoMA — after all, the Rockefellers went through the flamboyant trouble of demonstrating how deeply they care about art by bulldozing their mansion and building a museum on the site. The least you can do is ooh and ahh at their generous sacrifice.

Cafe 2, 11 West 53 St, Manhattan

Wed-Mon 11am-5pm | Closed Tue | Fri 11am-7:30p

There are a lot of these guys around the city, manning little carts and kiosks, serving us all sorts of delicious halal cuisine and their own special coffee brew. One day I was heading for an appointment on 28th and Madison, and as I turned the corner I saw a Pakistani guy shut away in his tiny coffee and bagel cart. It was freezing — around 20 — and I could smell his coffee from down the block, so I went up to him and asked for one.

“Two sugars?”

“Yeah, please.”

“Milk?”

“Cream if you have it.”

“Yes, here you go.” He popped the top onto the paper cup and handed it to me. I snatched it greedily, more for the warmth — which had suddenly become its own commodity worth paying for — than the beverage itself. “One dollar.”

I handed him the dollar and ambled west on 28th Street. That was the best cart coffee I had ever had. Better than any $4 piece of burnt Starbucks crap, I was convinced. It could have been the bitter cold that contributed to my appreciation, but I swear that little guy took time and care in crafting the cups of joe that came from his diminutive trailery hut.

I’m rarely in that area anymore, so I’m not sure if he’s still there. I don’t know how he did it for a buck.

28th and Madison Av, Manhattan

It’s not just because I used to live so close to Irving Farm that I often insisted on meeting there. Irving Place is one of those city lanes small enough that you don’t have to dodge much traffic to cross it, but still public enough that you can stroll down it and not be glared at as an intruder by the residents. Well-kept brownstones, one of the oldest purpose-built parking garages I have ever encountered (1929!), 1950s coops, and numerous neighborhood businesses coexist on this 6-(short )block street. The crown jewel of Irving, of course, is the peaceful and immaculate Gramercy Park, which generously lends its name to the surrounding neighborhood (doubtlessly farther from the park than most key-holding residents would prefer). A stroll around the periphery of the park is one of my favorite detours when I’m in the area — sure, it takes 5-10 more minutes to get where you’re going, but all those ornate towers and mansions, steeped in history, make it worthwhile.

In the heart of the minihood of Irving Place is Irving Farm, on the garden level of a very old house. Walking in feels like a hug: the warm woods and décor put me at ease. An ease begging to be shattered by a big ass cup of Irving’s astoundingly good house coffee. It’s so good I don’t even put sugar in it, just cream (half and half in this case; it’s all they have). You can get the coffee served in a ceramic cup, which I like because I feel like I’m not being rushed out — instead of “here’s your paper cup, now scram” it’s “have some coffee, stay a while.”

Irving has a great little pastry case, some of which I noticed comes from Balthazar (that means it’s good). They also have a decent menu of salads, sandwiches, and soups. And though the prices on the food are a bit steep, the staff hands it to you with a smile.

Overall, Irving Farm is what I’ll be calling a “Haunt” — a place to visit time and again.

Irving Farm, 71 Irving Place, Manhattan

M-W 7am-11pm | Th-F 7am-12am | Sat 8am-12am | Sun 8am-11pm