With more than 21 million annual visitors, the iconic Grand Central Terminal in Manhattan is one of New York City’s loveliest – and busiest – public spaces. And befitting NYC’s status as a glittering global coffee capital, Grand Central’s Beaux-Arts halls are today home to a dizzying array of specialty coffee options, where delicious espressos, bright and lovely filter coffees, and every imaginable brewing doodad can be yours for the purchase. In this feature, Liz Clayton goes exploring amongst the pounding human beat. This is New York City coffee in 2013. 

I can’t speak for everyone, but in decades past, I’d come to to expect a certain degree of anonymity from transit hubs, even those as beautiful and special, as well-integrated into city environs, as New York’s Grand Central Terminal. Before the fetishization of food took over where, you know, everything else cool left off, the best cuisine we could generally expect while on the run to our plane at point A, or our subway at point B, was a choice between the lesser chain evils of Dunkin Donuts or Sbarro. (What IS it about travel that makes Sbarro sound so good?) But, as you have no doubt already noticed, times have changed.

In the coffee-alert metropolis of New York City, a surprising thing has happened over the last couple of years. Grand Central Terminal, the railway nexus connecting Manhattan with the Hudson Valley, Connecticut and that soup dumpling place in Flushing, has become more like a Grand Coffee Terminal. No longer is it required to leave the beaten path and seek out the finest artisanal coffee tastes, or brewing bits and bobs. You can simply pick them up en route. Looking for a fantastic macchiato? V60 filters? A hand-prepared iced Kalita pourover brew? A selection of Cup of Excellence-winning beans? An electric Bonavita kettle? A cardboard box of coffee with a handle on it that comes with a handful of sugar packets and some bagel detritus stuck to the bottom? Look no further! However high your brow, Grand Central Terminal is now the one-stop one-hundred-year-old coffee shop for you.

I spent a jittery afternoon touring the concourses and passages of Grand Central, cataloging just how many specialty coffee options—and indeed, any kind of coffee options—exist within these halls. This is how they break down by area of interest:

Espresso

Quality espresso is available at Joe (in the dark and somewhat elusive Greybar Passage) and at Irving Farm (newly opened in the downstairs dining concourse). Both cafes give one the option of drinking your espresso-based beverage in an appropriate ceramic cup, no matter how late you are for your train. Financier, a bakery with a three-group Linea, will also make you an espresso (they appear to use Brooklyn private-label roaster Stone Street), which will be quite astringent and come in an itsy to-go cup—but to its credit is also presented with an itsy cello-wrapped pastry perched atop the miniature lid. Points for effort. Should you swing that way, there is also a Starbucks in the Lexington Passage.

Filter Coffee

Unsurprisingly, filter coffee options are where Grand Central Terminal really shines, and if you’re looking for something out of a Fetco you’ll be unbelievably fulfilled in this train station. Three Fetcos continually crank out a dozen (!) rotating urns of fresh coffee at Joe, and another battalion of thermal soldiers does the same downstairs at Irving Farm. Starbucks, if for some reason you can’t find the other coffee shops, at least maintains a batch of Blonde Roast on its urn rotation. And in an admirable move, Irving Farm also features by-the cup Kalita Wave brewing, in case you’d like to miss your train. And this reporter was able to suss out a bit of a scoop: Oren’s Daily Roast, located within the weird and stressful Grand Central Market portion of the station, isn’t technically allowed to sell prepared coffee (they stick to beans and gear)—but they do offer wee free samples from an airpot!

Gear and Whole Beans

Looking to outfit your countertop coffee bar en route to Poughkeepsie? You’re in luck! Grand Central is, somewhat inexplicably and totally unexpectedly, the perfect place to shop for assorted coffee accoutrements. Joe heroically fits a wide range of brewing tools into its diminutive space: V60 drippers, Buono kettles, Hario range servers, Chemexes. And just a couple hundred labyrinthine feet away is a truly Texas-sized array of gear at Oren’s Daily Roast: Clever drippers, Aeropresses, V60s, Chemex carafes in different sizes, a couple of Baratza grinders to choose from, Skerton hand grinders, Bonavita kettles and automatic coffee makers, Sowden Softbrew brewers, paper filters in all shapes and sizes…and that’s only the nice stuff. If you also need a selection of Moka Pots, handheld milk frothers decorated with the Union Jack, or novelty mugs bedecked with Hello Kitty, tie-dye, Scrabble motifs, or the cover of Abbey Road: they have that, too. Oren’s, Joe, and Irving Farm also all sell bags of their self-roasted whole bean coffee, though only Oren’s is forced to share airspace with an olifactorily distracting spice merchant just a few feet away.

Experience

If you’re looking for a 3WE (Third Wave Experience), your best choices in this building are clearly Irving Farm and Joe, though it’s at Joe you’ll feel most like you’re in a hip cafe—the baristas look the part, may be ironically debating classic rock records released before they were born, and there is a picture of Angry Cat pasted over the tip jar—and also least like it—there is nowhere to sit, everyone in there is often a white male in a suit, etc. That said, people do linger and often order smaller drinks to stay, and the coffee is fantastic. Irving Farm, down below, features an entirely circular bar which extends the seating possibilities to those of the wooden benches of the crowded dining concourse. You can take your fancy coffee and sit with the pizza-eaters and tallboy-drinkers, but you can also drink it in ceramic. Their buildout is impressive, with a shiny white La Marzocco FB80, which pleasingly distracts you from the fussy customers ordering custom-proportioned Arnold Palmers and cucumber sandwiches. Because this is — did we mention—GRAND CENTRAL FRIGGIN STATION—the number of staff is also staggering for these tiny locations. When I visited there were at least six staff were on duty in the midday hours at each, and I have a feeling more were hiding behind the scenes or crouched low under the counter. It’s a miracle how much is accomplished, how quickly, and in such magnitude, under these conditions. And pulling it off with quality? Very impressive, and very New York.

But this was meant to be a thorough exploration of Grand Central’s coffee offerings, and so I’m happy to report that should you find the aforementioned high quality options for satisfying your short- and long-term coffee needs insufficient, a survey of the premises concluded that one does, indeed, have other options. Magnolia Bakery will make you a coffee, as will the Tri-Tip Grill, Junior’s Most Fabulous Cheesecake, Mendy’s Kosher Delicatessen, Ciao Bella Gelato, Dishes, Zoro’s, Central Market New York, and hell—you can even get a cup of Lavazza at the Grand Central Oyster Bar. (We saw no brewing equipment visible at the Chirping Chicken or Feng Shui, but you might just have to know a guy.)

With these myriad options in place, your next trip upstate, crosstown, or just to the Apple Store should be more than satisfied by a selection of the finest in coffee and coffee-making equipment. And hey, should you also need a huge selection of makeup, olive oil, cigars, hard-to-find beers over $30 a bottle, or pret-a-microwave turkey meatloaf slabs, you’re going to be super-duper satisfied there, too. And there’s an even more coffee-ful future ahead for Grand Central. Rumor has it that Starbucks’ lease will be up within a year or two, to be replaced by something more locally grown. Fantastic news. Until then, we’ll be lingering awkwardly outside their entrance, soaking up the free WiFi signal.

Liz Clayton contributes coffee and tea coverage to Serious Eats, and will soon release her first book of original writing and coffee photography, “Nice Coffee Time.”

Read more Liz Clayton on Sprudge.

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Spotted via the most-excellent Lower Manhattan neighborhood blog Bowery Boogie, there’s new today that Irving Farm has purchased the cafe formerly known as 88 Orchard, located at the intersection of Orchard & Broome in New York City’s Lower East Side.

More from Bowery Boogie, and by more, we mean we’re copy & pasteboarding pretty much the whole article:

Seeing the 88 Orchard coffee shop listed on the SLA agenda for next week’s Community Board 3 meeting was certainly interesting. Especially since their current wine and beer license is active through November 30, 2013. The reason for the new application – the business was reportedly sold.

Indeed, it appears local mini-chain Irving Farm Coffee is the lucky new owner of the popular corner cafe. The familiar notice to neighbors pasted to the doorway seems to confirm this latest development. 88 Orchard would mark the fourth city location for the Hudson Valley roasters, co-owned by Stephen Leven and David Elwell.

This will be Irving Farm’s first foray into the Lower Manhattan retail game, and adds to their portfolio of cafes on Manhattan alongside locations in Chelsea and the Upper West Side. The now-departed 88 Orchard cafe was fairly well-regarded, actually, with this nice write-up by NY Mag and a fair 3.5 star Yelp rating. They served Irving Farm’s coffee previously in a wholesale capacity, and the cafe itself is located right across the street from the well-regarded Lower East Side Tenement Museum, which means lotsa foot traffic especially as we get into tourist season.

Jordan’s Uncle Irving unavailable for comment.

It’s worth mentioning that 88 Orchard is huge by NYC cafe standards, with a full floor of downstairs seating. In a city full of espresso bars but largely devoid of “cafes”, here’s another one from Irving Farm, whose similarly enormous-for-Manhattan spot on the Upper West Side offers ample room to stretch out, plus salad and sandwiches, all just blocks from the park. Seriously, the back room at that place is like a cram session fever dream for the grad school we never attended.

H/T to Bowery Boogie: Irving Farm Coffee Takes Over 88 Orchard. Top photo via Trip Advisor (glegh).

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Africa takes the spotlight at this year’s coffee service. Colorado’s Allegro has their Kenya Kirinyaga. New York’s Irving Farm selected their Rwanda Lake Kivu. There are plenty of Ethiopian coffees on bar, with British Columbia roaster Salt Spring‘s Amaro Gayo, Blue Bottle’s Chalalacktu and Oromia, Chicago-based Metropolis‘ Suke Quto, and Verve Coffee‘s Yirgacheffe from the Konga Cooperative.

Cincinnati’s Deeper Roots offers the one of two Latin American coffees on bar, with their Guatemala Santa Maria La Aromonia Hermosa. MadCap Coffee brings Colombia La Plata. With the 38 brilliant baristas chosen to serve these drinks via pour over and espresso methods, this is arguably the best multi-roaster pop-up in the world.

In addition to these offerings, the TED Coffee team have assembled a blend including Blue Bottle’s Ethiopia Kemgin, Salt Spring‘s Ethiopia Amaro Gayo, and Deeper Roots‘ Guatemala La Armonia Hermosa.

To the baristas currently toiling away in SoCal, making coffee for the TED attendees, if you need us to order a pizza or some take-out for you, e-mail us at ineedapizza@sprudge.com. We’ll figure something out.

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Newsflash: There is good coffee in New York City on the Upper West Side! The UWS is a largely untapped resource for specialty coffee, perhaps due to the frankly odd way of life that exists there – $6500 a month apartments directly next door to $500 rent controls! doormen that make more during Christmas than you do all year! that remarkable park, right there within walking distance, close enough to call your back yard! - but more likely on account of ludicrously high rents. Opening a new cafe there is risky, but the folks at Irving Farm are betting big by setting up a flagship space at 264 W 79th, between Broadway and Amsterdam, in the heart of the UWS. Here’s some more from the Irving Farm blog:

We’re completely reconstructing a 1500 square-foot space on the ground floor of a historic brownstone on West 79th Street in Manhattan. From the building materials and brewing equipment, to the coffee menu and food offerings, we’re designing a space that will be unlike anything we’ve built before, and a cafe experience we hope will be unlike anything you’ve ever had before!

We’re still several weeks away from opening the doors, but we can’t help our excitement as all the new components begin to fit into place. On the counter, we’ll have a La Marzocco Strada and a beatifully hand-crafted bar for our Kalita pour-over gear—all of this to present our dynamic menu of blended and single-origin coffees that Dan Streetman (Ed. note: that’s him riding the Wooly Mammoth), our Coffee Director, has been working hard to source. In addition to the coffee, our menu will feature craft beers, a small list of wines and local meats and cheeses. And, to take it all in, we’ll have a back lounge with a skylight and a 10-foot community dining table made of reclaimed wood.

Irving Farm’s new cafe is designed by the architecture firm LEVENBETTS (we understand they prefer the full capitalization), whose website is here – we dare you not to lose an hour there.

Let’s put this is New York context, shall we? To reach the new Irving Farm cafe, one takes the oft-ignored 1 train, which, if you haven’t been on it in a while, is actually quite nice – there’s usually the full dot-tracking stop service in each car, and the tone of your train will be its own whole thing, a mix of Columbia students, incognito (or accidental) billionaires, and collected sociological samples from that odd para-world that exists along the Northern finger of Manhattan Island serviced by the 1, all the way to that amazing castle-thing in Fort Tryon Park. Take the 1 and get off on the 79th Street stop – Irving Farm UWS is a proverbial hop, skip, and jump away.

Irving Farm joins Joe NYC’s space on W. 84th (Ecco) and the Momofuku Milk Bar space on Columbus and W. 84th (Stumptown) as outposts for high-end non-Starbucks coffee options on that side of Central Park. It is also worth noting that Irving Farm’s new space will be within mere blocks (and a $19 suggested donation) from the T-Rex fossil on permanent exhibition at the American Natural History Museum. We’re working on an approbative thesis now: “Good Coffee and Dinosaurs: Towards A New Duality”.

More, we say! We want more good roasters represented above and around Central Park, and we want it now! Don’t you realize these neighborhoods are chockablock with curious billionaires, surreal vistas, and all manner of cool / weird stuff to do? Coffee is such a lovely way to enjoy and explore New York, and we don’t just mean the New York below 34th Street. This very promising development from Irving Farm gives us one more excellent excuse to go see the Aptosaurus, the wooly mammoth, and the Hayden Planetarium….summer softball in the park, anyone?

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