Step Into the Brewtique
For years, Astor Place was the corner of Starbucks and Starbucks. Two outposts were located a few hundred feet apart, both thriving despite their proximity. By 2024, they were gone, but you’d be forgiven for missing the funeral — you probably didn’t even miss a cold brew. There are now at least ten places to get a nice coffee within five minutes of Astor Place, and none of them is a Starbucks. A few blocks south, one such place to find good coffee is not a coffee shop at all; it’s a J.Crew. Thanks to a partnership between the mall favorite and Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee, the store has its own espresso bar, clad in green ceramic tiles and kitted out with a few stools in case anyone wants to linger.
Why is J.Crew trying to sell coffee alongside its giant chinos? The better question: What took so long? Across the city, retailers are embracing the pull of great espresso, which is now available from the Uniqlo on Fifth Avenue, Aimé Leon Dore, Maison Kitsuné, Arc’teryx, and Buck Mason, to name just a few.
These are the brewtiques. They’ve replaced boyfriend chairs with low stools and café tables. They’ve got racks of clothes and business partnerships with name-brand roasters. They have no-laptop policies and cool little demitasse cups from local artisans. And they’re right at the center of the burgeoning Fourth Wave of coffee, the ethos of which is pretty simple: Everything is better if it’s also a high-end café.
The city’s protobrewtique opened way back in 2009 on Crosby Street. “We wanted to create a space that brought people in,” says Morgan Collett, a co-founder of Saturdays NYC. The first thing they installed after the lease was signed: a La Marzocco espresso machine that has outlived the store itself. The Saturdays boutique closed just after Labor Day; the café will remain open until November. There was no established model at the time — the founders liked surfing and coffee and figured their customers might, too — but the setup worked as both a profit driver (coffee sales accounted for 25 to 30 percent of Saturdays’ revenue) and a marketing tool. “Instead of coming in to buy a garment, customers were able to come in to buy a coffee and sit in the backyard,” Collett says. “It’s an honest introduction.”
This past summer, around the corner from the former Saturdays, the menswear specialist Buck Mason opened its own brewtique in the two-story Broadway storefront that once housed Madewell. The brand’s café concept anchors the space with an Eames chair, a record player, and “a curated library of over 1,000 vintage books.” It is as much a mood board as it is a café or a spot to grab casual tees in neutral hues.
The Coach version of a brewtique — which sprang out of a one-off test concept in Southeast Asia last year — is modeled, a bit like Ralph Lauren’s Ralph’s shops, on an “old-school diner” complete with an irreverent mascot named Lil Miss Jo. But there are no tins of stale Folgers behind the bar. “We serve great coffee,” says Marcus Sanders, VP of global food and beverage for Coach, which has 17 Coach Coffee Shops around the world and 20 more in the works. “I think that’s still a critical piece of it.”
“We’re trying to meet our core customers where they are,” says Sanders. For Coach, that has meant watching to see which places Gen Z has gravitated toward, especially post-pandemic. “Coffee shops and restaurants are having this moment to be these really, really cool spaces for people to meet up, kind of like how it used to feel in the ’80s and ’90s. It’s coming back again.”
The brewtique is hardly a one-sided phenomenon — in 2023, Blue Bottle released a New Balance sneaker — and it’s hardly limited to clothing. “A plant store is really a community business,” says Eric Mourkakos, the third-generation owner of PlantShed, which sells washed-process South American bean blends alongside its zeylanica. Mourkakos says the average shop does 30 to 40 percent of its revenue in coffee and the rest in plants, flowers, and accessories. “When we started, we weren’t really so much focused on making profits from the café,” he says. “It was more about getting people to come in every day to buy their coffee. And then when it’s their co-worker’s birthday, they think about the brand to buy flowers.”
PlantShed’s beans are roasted by Partners Coffee, and every brewtique owner agrees on one detail: For the model to work, the coffee must be good. “You need coffee that people will buy and then rebuy in the future because the core of our business is return customers,” says Andrew Costaris, a vice-president at the Brooklyn-based roaster. “People are just trying to find these little moments of happiness that they can get for themselves at $4, $5, $6 every day.” He sees a shift happening, a proper “brick-and-mortar renaissance” away from the digital marketplace and back toward IRL interactions. Every brand now needs a storefront, and if that means paying Manhattan lease rates, every brand also needs a diversified revenue stream: The Sporty & Rich in Soho is a juice bar. Kith serves ice cream. And nothing is better at pulling in passersby than espresso. Why does it feel as if there is good coffee everywhere? Because to some degree, we all want good coffee everywhere.
Does this represent a New Wave? A half-wave? A riptide within the Third Wave? Though many of these espresso bars seem to have sprung directly from the wake of the Third Wave, they’ve shed most of its language. Few of the brewtiques use phrases like “single-origin” to describe their offerings, and few offer pour-over. This isn’t coffee as a status signal for customers; it’s not even really a wealth signal. In fact, the signaling is mostly coming from the retailers: Look, they say, We like nice coffee, too.