Espresso Goes East -- New Yorkers Wake Up And Smell The Coffee From Seattle

THE CITY that never sleeps has another thing to keep people awake. At least five Seattle-style coffee bars have opened in New York City.

NEW YORK - It used to be that a regular coffee here meant one thing: milk and two sugars, usually served in a blue cardboard container, a picture of two halos of steam floating over a cup and saucer.

The lid was white plastic. You'd make an opening by tearing two slits on the side and pulling back. That way you wouldn't have to take the lid off as you hung onto a strap in a rumbling subway car, slurping.

But the lexicon of coffee has become more complex here over the last year, thanks to a growing number of shops either started by Seattle natives or inspired by Seattle, and all employing Seattleites.

At least five espresso shops fashioned after those in Seattle have popped up around the city, introducing such unheard-of terms as skinny, single latte.

In these places, a "regular" coffee can mean anything that's not an espresso.

For New Yorkers - some of whom still order a skinny, single lady - it was "a touch confusing at first," said Maynard Engel, as he took a break at the Daily Cafe in Rockefeller Center.

Engel, a financial consultant in a blue tailored suit, who sat at a purplish marble counter reading The New York Times clipped to the wall, said it was embarrassing. But he's learning.

In an accent more patrician than New Yawkese, he ordered a single, tall latte, decaf, as smoothly as any coffee drinker in Seattle.

Still, he said, "I'm always afraid I forgot one or two of the words. I have to keep going back and ask them, `did I tell you decaf? Did I tell you single?' "

Because the rents here are as high as $170 a month per square foot, the coffee costs more than it does in Seattle. A single, tall latte can cost $2.50 compared with $1.50 in Seattle.

"It's amazing when you consider I come down here two or three times a day. That's about $8 a day for coffee," Engel said. "But it's become a compulsion. I look forward to coming down here."

On the scene

The Daily Cafe was the first of these shops, opening in April 1992. Started by Andrew Price, a graduate of Lakeside High School, it is tucked in the corner of a concourse under Rockefeller Center that connects to 17 office high-rises.

A month after the Daily Cafe opened, Howard Pilmar, the president of an office-supply store who had admired Seattle's coffee on a business trip, opened Phillip's a block from the Empire State Building. The stand, which is named after Pilmar's 6-year-old son, is just inside the storefront window of Pilmar's stationery store, near the cash register and rows of pens and notebooks.

Both businesses did well enough in the first few months for each of the owners to start a second store - Phillip's in a street-side store near Carnegie Hall; the Daily Cafe at the bottom of an escalator leading to the Rockefeller Center ice rink. Price's store is below the General Electric Building, which houses NBC studios. It's reputed that NBC anchor Tom Brokaw and Today show host Katie Couric are among the converts to Seattle coffee.

Then in May, two recent graduates of the University of Washington opened Seattle Bean on the upper East Side in an area still called Germantown, frequented by many of New York's young professionals.

The owners, Amy Hendrickson, 24, and Maggie McGrady, 22, say Seattle coffee has become so popular that even some street people are coming up with the money for a cup each morning.

The owners have been at the crest of an eastward migration of Seattle-style coffee that's spread to Chicago and Washington, D.C. Starbucks has opened six stores in Washington, D.C., and expects to open six more by Thanksgiving.

"It's popular there for the same reason it's been popular here," said George Reynolds, Starbucks' senior vice president for marketing. "A lot of people drink coffee, and they're finally discovering that there's an alternative to the stale swill they'd been drinking."

Recognizing good coffee

Phillip's founder Pilmar, a native New Yorker who speaks a New Yawkese laced unconsciously with expletives, said it puzzled him, when he went to Seattle, that espresso bars hadn't made their way to New York because good coffee is good anywhere. But, he said, "New York is the first in a lot of things and last in a lot of things."

He opened the store after spending most weekends for a year jetting back and forth to Seattle to learn the trade from an espresso vendor in the Pike Place Market.

"People thought I was crazy for opening a coffee stand in an office-supply store," he said. "But I was right."

But both Phillip's and the Daily Cafe found getting started difficult at first.

When Price and his partner, Todd Collins, decided to try opening a cafe, it took them a year to find someone who'd rent them space.

"No one understood what we were trying to do," said Price, who met Collins when they ran adjacent booths in the Pike Place Market. Price ran a catalog business of the market's merchandise; Collins ran a pastry shop with an espresso machine.

What they eventually got was the old souvenir shop for the New York Experience, once a popular tourist attraction that showed scenes of New York on one round screen.

The day the store opened, Price offered free coffee. No one came. A few straggled in during the first week, fewer still came back. "They thought it was too expensive, or the coffee was too strong," Price said. "I thought I was going to die."

Eventually, though, word spread through a newsletter for the office buildings in Rockefeller Center. It turned out many, like Engel, had tasted Seattle espresso and longed for it.

Unlike Pilmar and Price, Hendrickson and McGrady had no business experience. Hendrickson had studied English at the UW, McGrady political science. Neither had even worked at an espresso bar.

But they are both acknowledged coffee addicts, and when McGrady came to New York last summer to try to figure out what to do with her degree, she couldn't find a decent cup of coffee.

She saw an opportunity as rich as a Starbucks' double tall, and convinced her friend to quit a job as an administrative assistant in a Seattle brokerage and move to the city.

They did research at the library, studied the espresso business by visiting Seattle coffee stores, and convinced friends in Seattle to invest in their business. It cost them about $125,000 to start the store, a little less than Price and a little more than Pilmar, who already had the spot in his office-supply store.

Now Hendrickson and McGrady are turning a profit and getting compliments from customers.

Part of their success is location. Although there are few office workers in the area, there are many apartment buildings. A comedy club across the street also draws a night crowd to the store, which is open until 11 p.m.

To decide on the location, "We literally walked 10 hours a day just looking at people and trying to tell if they were the types to drink espresso," Hendrickson said.

"We had a lot of arguments about it," McGrady said.

They hired an architect, who designed the store in a Seattle motif. Hendrickson pointed out ceilings as gray as Seattle skies. The ceiling lamps are round and white like clouds. The walls are evergreen gray.

There are touches of Seattle in the other stores, too. At the Daily Cafe near Carnegie Hall, you can buy chocolate coffee beans made by Dilettante, says Talitha Whidbee, 21, one of two managers from Seattle that Pilmar hired to run his stores. Whidbee's parents started the Gravity Bar in Seattle.

The stores also import Seattle coffee: The Daily Cafe from Starbucks, Seattle Bean from Caravali and Phillip's from Allann Brothers.

The stores have also brought a friendliness behind the counter to a city accustomed to being met by "whaddaayuaneed."

"In New York, nobody looks at you. Nobody smiles. Nobody makes eye contact," Whidbee said. "We like to think that everybody gets at least acknowledged when they're standing in line. At least make eye contact."

Price said it hasn't been easy finding workers who can do that. "It's not like Seattle, where everybody is basically nice," he said. Price also employs three Washington natives.

Customers said they've noticed the difference.

"It's nice coming in here," said Judy Goldstein, a magazine editor who dropped by Phillip's for an iced cappuccino during her lunch hour. "People smile at you. They talk to you. They're not just coffee dispensers who just stand there and hand you a cup."

Rude awakening

On the other hand, working in New York has been a rude awakening for some of the Seattle natives.

The Daily Cafe has a sign to help New Yorkers pronounce what they are drinking.

"Latte," it says. "La-tay."

But even if they still pronounce it la-tee or lady, "they think they're the experts," said David Chick, who once worked at the Pike Place Market wearing a sandwich board advertising for a pie shop.

"A lot of the people here are NBC executives, who spend their time deciding what we watch on television," he said. "After they've been here a few times, they think they know how a latte is supposed to be made better than you do."

Despite the success so far, Marty Cummins, who works at Seattle Bean, wonders if Seattle espresso is "just the flavor of the month." He's lived in New York for a while now, and he's seen the Ethiopian, Cajun and Vietnamese restaurants open with fanfare and close unnoticed.

But Pilmar thinks good coffee is here to stay. "This isn't like pet rocks or bell bottoms," he said. "Once you have a taste for something good, you're not going back to the corner deli."

Whidbee agrees. Coffee, she said, is an important part of the morning. And in New York, perhaps more than anywhere else, "it's really important to get off to a good start to the day."