Devoción sources coffee from growers in Colombia and roasts it in Brooklyn. The company manages dry milling in Bogotá before sending beans to its New York roastery. Its cafés and retail coffee bags give drinkers ways to explore those Colombian origins, with the Williamsburg location among its New York addresses.
Best for Colombian coffee roasted in Brooklyn
Devoción was founded in 2006 by Steven Sutton, who is Colombian-born, on a straightforward premise: get coffee from Colombian farms to New York cups as fast as physically possible. The company buys directly during active harvest, skipping warehouses and importers, and its own site claims a supply chain that can move "from origin to your cup as fast as 10 days" — fast enough that beans are still close to peak freshness by the time they're roasted in Brooklyn. An origin team travels to Colombia year-round to source coffee directly from farmers rather than through intermediaries, and the company holds B Corp certification for the sustainability and labor practices behind that sourcing.
What started as a single roastery has grown into six New York locations — Williamsburg and Downtown Brooklyn, plus Dumbo, NoMad, Flatiron, and Midtown Manhattan — each built around the brand's signature living plant walls, which turn the cafés into small greenhouses as much as coffee bars. The pitch is unusually literal for a coffee company: the freshness claim isn't marketing shorthand but a stated 10-day supply-chain number, and the farm relationships are run by a team whose whole job is traveling to Colombia to maintain them directly.
A New York coffee institution — ethically sourced beans, expert baristas, and multiple locations serving the city's daily caffeine ritual.
Best for New York coffee, ethically sourced beans, and neighborhood cafés
Joe Coffee Company has been operating in New York for more than 20 years, according to its own site, growing from a single café in the West Village into a citywide chain spanning Flatiron, Brooklyn Heights, Dumbo, Long Island City, and a newer outpost inside the TWA Hotel at JFK Airport. The company roasts its own beans in Long Island City and describes its sourcing as built on "long-term partners" rather than spot-market buying.
Beyond retail, Joe runs a barista training program, wholesale and catering services, and a "Regular Coffee Club" subscription for beans delivered on a schedule. The company also frames part of its identity around a stated equity initiative it calls "Joe Humanity." Two decades on, the throughline from that first West Village café to the JFK terminal location is the same small-roaster model — one roastery in Queens supplying a growing map of neighborhood cafés — rather than a shift toward a single flagship or a nationally distributed retail bag.
La Colombe, "proudly roasted in Philadelphia," built its NYC cafés around the Draft Latte, its self-described "ridiculously frothy, coffee-forward" drink, now sold in seasonal versions like Pumpkin Spice and S'mores.
Best for Draft lattes and Rittenhouse-Square-rooted roasting in Manhattan's laptop-friendly cafes
La Colombe traces back to a friendship formed at a grunge concert in Seattle in the 1980s, between Todd Carmichael and JP Iberti, who bonded over a shared frustration with the quality of coffee available in the US at the time. That conversation eventually became a business: in 1994 the two opened their first La Colombe cafe in Philadelphia's Rittenhouse Square, built around premium roasting rather than the diner-style coffee dominant in America before the third-wave shift. The company grew from that single Philadelphia cafe into roughly thirty cafes and a large wholesale account base nationwide, expanding into New York and other cities while keeping its roasting operation Philadelphia-based. Its most visible innovation came in 2016, when Carmichael introduced a canned draft latte -- nitro-style, poured cold -- that became the company's signature retail product and one of the more widely copied formats in the ready-to-drink coffee category since. In 2015, Chobani founder Hamdi Ulukaya bought a stake in the company, and Chobani later acquired La Colombe outright for roughly $900 million, one of the larger acquisitions in the American specialty coffee industry. The Manhattan cafes carry that history forward: draft lattes on tap, sourced and roasted under the same Philadelphia operation Carmichael and Iberti started three decades ago.
A red-brick 1895 seminary dormitory in Chelsea, reopened as a hotel in 2013. The lobby café pours Intelligentsia beneath the original Gothic ceilings.
Best for Intelligentsia coffee inside an 1895 Gothic seminary dormitory turned hotel.
The High Line Hotel occupies a building that has nothing to do with hospitality by trade: it was built in 1895 as a dormitory for the General Theological Seminary, an Episcopal school still operating next door. Architect Charles C. Haight designed the Collegiate Gothic campus after Oxford and Cambridge, and the red-brick dormitory is the surviving centerpiece. The land itself has an odd literary footnote — it belonged to Clement Clarke Moore, credited with writing 'Twas the Night Before Christmas, before he donated it to the Episcopal Church in 1817.
MCR Hotels and the Brodsky Organization converted the dormitory into a hotel that opened in May 2013, keeping the Gothic brickwork and arched windows intact. The lobby café and garden serve pour-over and espresso from Intelligentsia Coffee, one of the standard-bearers of American third-wave roasting. The hotel picked up a World's Best Award in 2019 and a Condé Nast Traveler Readers' Choice Award in 2023 — recognition for a building whose original purpose was training clergy, not hosting guests.
Named for Edgar Allan Poe, who lived nearby on West 84th Street in the 1840s. The Amsterdam Avenue café is the sole survivor after its original location closed in 2011.
Best for Upper West Side café fare near Edgar Allan Poe’s former neighborhood
Edgar's Cafe takes its name from Edgar Allan Poe, who lived on West 84th Street between March 1844 and August 1845 — a stretch of the block once informally known as Edgar Allan Poe Street. The café originally operated two locations at once: the primary shop at 255 West 84th Street and a second outpost on Amsterdam Avenue. The 84th Street original closed around 2011, reportedly a casualty of the lease, after roughly two decades in business.
The Amsterdam Avenue location survived and is now the only Edgar's left, carrying the Poe theme forward inside a gothic Italian-inspired room — high arched ceilings, dim lighting, a look that leans into the literary reference rather than treating it as a name only. It's a small, specific kind of neighborhood landmark: a café that outlived its own flagship and kept the theme intact, on a stretch of the Upper West Side where Poe himself once rented rooms.
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