Brokelyn

Then there's this problem.

Press a button and it’s done. Single-serve coffee machines are delicious, easy, and a sure sign of your upward mobility. But The New York Times is blowing the foil lid off the terrible truth: those little plastic cups factor out to about $50 or more per pound. Apparently, single-serve coffee is one more devil spawn of Starbucks. The Times writes:

“Americans under the age of 40 are thinking about coffee pricing in cups,” said Ric Rhinehart, executive director of the Specialty Coffee Association of America. “If you asked my mother how much coffee cost, she would have told you that the red can was $5.25 a pound and the blue can was $4.25. If you ask people in their 20s and 30s, they’ll say coffee is $1.75 to $3.75 a cup.”

Of course, it follows that anyone charging $175 for a coffee maker will probably rip you off on the coffee itself, especially when they pack it in tiny, excessively wrapped, proprietary containers. Consider it the Gillette safety razor of coffee. Here’s the Times’ full story.

Even the most committed brokavore has an achilles heel. Schmancy ice cream, farm raised this or that, deep-fried anchovy skeletons. Mine is coffee: oily, aromatic, dark roast, whole bean, utter, hopeless snobbery. I’m so pathetic I recently bought a junky little milk frother to elevate the experience. But after running out of the good stuff for the first time in my adult life this week, it was time to suck it up and embark upon a long-overdue Brokelyn taste test: supermarket coffees. Read the rest of this entry »

BK Roasting Company's Rebecca and Janel show off the sweet ceramic cup.

Two horrible things happen every time you get a Starbucks: 1) you’re giving money to Starbucks and 2) you get a one-time use wasteful paper cup that you’ll gulp down and discard on the train platform, never to be seen again. Brooklyn Roasting Company, Dumbo’s adorable little bean factory by the water, is trying to solve this problem. They’ve started selling vintage ceramic cups for 50 cents a piece, so you can take your coffee to-go without taking a tree with you. Bring it back and you get discounted coffee or cappuccino refills. They’ll even wash it for you! Read the rest of this entry »

Barista Patrick Cronin at Qartha. photo via Daily News

The Daily News, last seen coming in second in the porn headline war, weighs in on a topic New Yorkers take extremely personally: coffee shops. The best in the whole city, according to the tab, is the relatively new Qathra in Ditmas Park. The paper extols the sunny back patio as a choice spot for sipping fair-trade next to a garden, where Qathra grows parsley, scallion and cilantro to use in salads. “The sound of water flowing from the fountain out back creates a serene environment rarely found within the five boroughs,” gushes the paper. We’re fans too, and have even held a few meetings there since the demise of Vox Pop. But is it the best in the whole city?  Read the rest of this entry »

Deal sites. We love ‘em. Except when we buy the coupons and forget to redeem them (like half of the coupon-buying population, we’re told.)

So when the folks at a groovy new deal site called Tenka told us about their wallet-friendly twist on the usual pay-up-front model, we thought you might like to know more. On Tenka, you don’t have to pay on the front or the back end—most of their deals are totally, completely free.

Tenka, an NYC-based site founded by two ex-Googlers, Nhon Ma & Tim Zhou, specializes in mom-and-pop places that are overlooked by the bigger players in the deal space. It launches in Brooklyn today with a veritable freebie-palooza in Williamsburg: Read the rest of this entry »

Brooklyn Label. Photos by Jax Bischof.

For the select few who were walking down Franklin Avenue on this knock-your-socks-off chilly winter’s Friday, there probably wasn’t a more enticing spot than the sun-filled nooks of the Brooklyn Label coffee shop. The wind practically buffeted me into this cute corner cafe, which has more than enough space (and free WiFi) for a dozen or more laptops—in other words, a perfect place for our occasional feature, “What’s on your laptop?” Read the rest of this entry »

The Bridgeview, photo by Lindsay Buckley.

I love diners; I always have. Partly it’s because I grew up in Jersey, in a town with a famous railroad-car-style diner across from the train station (the Summit Diner—get the navy-bean soup), at a time when, if you didn’t have an older sibling to buy you some beer, the bulk of your teenage social time was spent crammed in six to a four-top booth, splitting a single piece of pie and playing the jukebox. Partly it’s the decor; I dig the solid, comforting, chrome-and-linoleum atomic-bobby-sox styling of a diner, right down to the retro pillowy mints at the register.

Brooklyn’s got dozens of diners, and I aim to eat in each of them at least once.  If you don’t have that kind of time, or that much elastic in your wardrobe, dig my Best Ofs below and see how your local stacks up. Read the rest of this entry »

Your devoted scribe once spent two weeks driving through Canada with a singer-songwriter on an acoustic-duo tour, and if there’s one phrase that trip brings to mind other than “indifferent audiences” and “lame beer,” it’s “Tim Hortons.” The Canadian donut chain is a ubiquitous presence on the endless highways of the Great White North, more common than caribou roadkill.

Now the chain is generating some hoopla by opening a dozen stores in New York City, having been imported to replace Dunkin’ Donuts outlets by the Riese Corporation, the Chilis-and-TGIFridays-pimping restaurant group whose influence on the Manhattan food scene is akin to Custer’s influence on the Indians. The question: will they steal the thunder of Dunkin’ Donuts, which has opened hundreds of outlets in the city over the past few years? Read the rest of this entry »