The New Yorker by David Kortava

Buzzed and Wired at Kobrick Coffee Co.

In “A Moveable Feast,” the consummate day drinker Ernest Hemingway narrates his order in a Paris café: a café au lait, two servings of Martinique rum, and a half carafe of dry white wine. The great buzzed and wired bard of the Jazz Age would have liked Kobrick Coffee, where the baristas are cross-trained as mixologists and the creative synergy between the twin disciplines of craft coffee and craft cocktails rises to the level of art. From early morning until late afternoon, the place churns to the rhythms of aproned barmen grinding beans for espresso and tapping pitchers of steamed milk to break up the bubbles. By 8 P.M., the lights are dimmed, candles and dainty bud vases are set out, and a menu board rolls back to reveal a handsome liquor cabinet. Sitting permanently atop the counter is a tall and intricate Japanese cold-brew apparatus, in which the makings of a Negroni drip slowly through freshly ground coffee, for the Three Hour Kyoto Negroni. The house take on the Old-Fashioned involves Four Roses bourbon that’s been plunged through an AeroPress, and the delectable Mexican Jumping Bean unites tequila with ristretto. The caffeinated permutations of familiar ingredients, combined with a playlist that swings restlessly from Ella Fitzgerald to Norwegian E.D.M., creates an atmosphere that is at once nostalgic and ultramodern, a reflection of the city itself. Enter past midnight and it’s as though you stepped into an Edward Hopper painting. A Bumble date would not be out of place, but neither would a solitary writing session over a caffè corretto, two fingers of Jamaican rum, and a Loca Mocha—a bottle of house-made chocolate milk spiked with Jameson. ♦