Can Local Coffee Shops Rebound From The Pandemic?

Every weekday morning for the last six years, I’ve stopped at a cart outside my office and purchased a $2 cup of coffee that tastes disgusting.

I’m not slandering the cart vendor — it’s just a testament to how much we as New Yorkers love buying coffee that someone else made for us. A WalletHub study last year found that New York City had the most coffee shops per capita (followed by San Francisco and Las Vegas). Cart coffee, third-wave coffee, large-chain coffee that tastes like mint chocolate chip ice cream — we love it all!

Yet now, between the pause on non-essential commuting, the ban on cramped table set-ups, and the fact that it’s pretty easy to make yourself a pot of coffee at home, coffee shops are on the ropes, and it’s uncertain if or how they’ll come back.

“We thought — as so many others did — that this is super temporary, we’re going to get through two or three weeks until it feels safer, and then we’ll start reopening,” said Jonathan Rubinstein, the founder of Joe Coffee Company. “But, as naive and foolish as so many businesses are, here we are nine weeks later.”

Joe closed all 20 of its stores weeks before Mayor Bill de Blasio officially ordered food service establishments to switch to take-out- and delivery-only. (The company has a 21st location on Governors Island, which has not yet opened for the season.) That meant laying off 250 employees immediately. Between the staff members at the roastery and a few people in the corporate office, only eight employees remained on the payroll.

Caffe Reggio, the 93-year-old Greenwich Village landmark that claims to have served the first ever cappuccino in the United States, also closed (and laid off its staff) at the start of the pandemic, even though remaining open for takeout was technically still an option.

“The message that I heard from the mayor when I listened to one of his press conferences, he was like, ‘Well, you’re allowed to stay open, people just can’t sit down.’ Well, that’s not how it works,” said Lena Batyuk, Caffe Reggio’s manager. When on-site dining ended, her sales dropped 95 percent.

“Originally, we closed down because, frankly, I think the staff didn’t feel safe coming to work, taking the subway, and just being exposed and working with people for a while,” said Batyuk. “So, we decided to take a break.”

Since reopening two weeks ago, Caffe Reggio has been serving takeout (the cafe has a light menu of sandwiches and other Italian plates). It also signed up for GrubHub and Doordash for the first time. And Batyuk, who’s technically unemployed at the moment, has been making house calls to one Caffe Reggio regular.

“We have a very old customer who has been in this neighborhood forever, he’s 86, and he would come in twice a week and have his coffee and his breakfast and have his friends come in and chat,” Batyuk said. “And now, since he’s not allowed to leave his apartment, I go visit him, staying six feet apart.”

With the future of in-person dining still uncertain, Jonathan Rubinstein from Joe said one change he’s seen could become permanent.

"People are buying beans — they’re learning this is not too difficult [to] make delicious coffee at home,” Rubinstein said. “That’s the part that will probably be forever changed — we’ll sell more raw ingredients.”

He said that prior to the pandemic, bags of coffee made up five percent of his company’s total sales. (“It was gravy, it was branding,” he said.) Now, bean sales are up tenfold, he said, and it’s helping the company pay its bills. A little.

“I’ve been told for 17 years, ‘Oh coffee, it costs 10 cents to make a cup and you charge $4, you must be rolling in money!’” Rubinstein said. “But the complexity of it, everything from contracting at origin with farmers, traveling there, getting beans here, roasting them, distributing them, the training, the paper, whatever else it is, it ends up being a fairly costly product."

“It is a tough business, and it’s a volume business,” he added. “We’re projecting to do about 25 percent of our regular revenue in June. And maybe ramping that up to 40 percent in July? And we’re not sure, but the idea of 100 percent recovery, which is just where you start to make money — I talk to owners of a lot of other coffee shops, and all of us are sort of questioning, when is that going to recover to what it once was? None of us think that’ll be this year.”

One coffee shop that may be best poised to weather the pandemic is also one of the city’s newest: Clockface Coffee, which opened in Bay Ridge just six months ago.

Andrey Alexandrov, a 33-year-old immigrant from Siberia, had worked in kitchens as a dish-washer and a line cook before he said he tasted “good quality coffee” and decided to become a barista. After a few jobs in Brooklyn coffee shops, he found a modest storefront on a side street (it looks like a converted garage) and opened shop last November as a one-man operation. When the pandemic hit, he stocked up on masks, gloves, and cleaning supplies, and continued to stay open.

“I think coffee shops are a little bit more on the safe side, they can improvise,” he said. “For the restaurants, it’s a tougher situation because they have many employees. From dishwashers to account management, there should be like 10 people working in a restaurant. While coffee shops can operate with a maximum of three.”

Since opening, he said his traffic has grown to about 40 customers a day, 20 of whom are regulars. And they keep coming.

“I think I will be okay — at least for a couple of months — to be paying my rent and bills, which are still coming,” said Alexandrov. “My customers give generous tips, I notice. Bay Ridge is very supportive in this situation, which I'm really thankful for.”