The Best Coffee In New York

If you’ve never been to New York. There is one must-visit destination you have to try. The Starbucks at Astor Place.
Yes, Seriously.
Yes I know endorsing a Starbucks in Manhattan is like recommending McDonald’s for a burger. Starbucks is boring and pedestrian and non-hip. It’s not the high end coffee option any more. Gone are the trappings of “gourmet.” It’s fast food and fast-ish complicated coffee. So why go to a Starbucks on the border of the village and NYU land?

Welcome to Starbucks, Astor Place. The commons of modern New York City.

Here you get NYU undergrads their eyes half distant staring into their laptop screens, ubiquitous white cables dangling from their ears.
Suit and tie professionals who just want their goddamn latte already.
The single angry old rocker who remembers when this street was bad ass.
The impossibly tall, frighteningly thin fashionistas proving their bonafides by wearing hats that would, in any other context, be just silly.
Pink sweater clad tourists amazed by the sheer quantity of metal protruding from that young girl’s face.
Young mothers in lululemon pants pushing strollers, glistening from their trip the gym. Kickboxing was fun.
The 14 year-old kid with the sideways trucker hat and the tee shirt that reads “I fight every day” — he bought his macchiato with a credit card.
The CEO of a tech startup wearing Abercrombie shorts, flip flops and a hoodie interviewing his next head of social media marketing, a nervous 22 year old who wore his only suit for the encounter.
Rosie. You will learn her name because she starts each of the four phone calls she makes with “hello, so-and-so this is Rosie.” Rosie is 79 but doesn’t look a day over 65. Rosie is awesome. She wears a yellow tee shirt and white pants. I don’t know what the people in 5G are doing, but Rosie is not happy about it.
Surrounded by the discourse of the crowd it is easy to forget another group. Toiling behind mass-produced danishes, cash registers, and (not so very) discounted CDs. They’re reciting canned greetings to those snaking their way down the line. They wear black shirts and green aprons. They work harder than most of the visiting patrons to Starbucks will today. They are baristas. They politely hand out profitable beverages between daydreams of better times ahead.
Go to a Starbucks on the upper west side and you’ll find new money. On the upper east side it’ll be old money. Times Square will give you a peek into what tourists find exciting. Lower manhattan will give you the wired day trader.
Astor Place is all of those things and none of them. It’s both the New York of “Friends” and the New York of “Taxi Driver.” At it’s core it’s dirty, vibrant and unsanitary but too close to wealth not to be scrubbed daily by our national branding machine. Money and culture battle here like the Hatfields and the McCoys.

In this Starbucks that battle is waged in a din of conversation, the air thick with the aroma of coffee beans and the feeling of free wifi.