Brooklyn Coffee Shops With a Serious Espresso Program

Plenty of Brooklyn cafes can make you a fine latte. Far fewer treat the espresso itself as the point. This is a guide for the second kind: the rooms where you can order a straight double or a cortado and trust that the shot underneath was worth ordering on its own, with nothing to hide behind. A latte can carry a mediocre shot for miles, buried under steamed milk and a leaf drawn on top. A naked espresso cannot. It is the most honest thing on the menu, which is why the shops that pour a good one tend to be the ones paying attention to everything else too.

What we mean by a serious espresso program is not complicated, but it is specific. Fresh beans, a grinder dialed in through the day rather than set once in the morning, shots weighed in and out instead of eyeballed, and a barista who tastes what they are sending out. You can usually tell inside a minute: espresso has its own line on the menu, the beans have a roast date, and the person behind the bar will happily pull you a doppio without a lecture. If you want the vocabulary first, our guide to ordering coffee in Brooklyn covers the cortado-versus-gibraltar questions.

The surest place to start is a cafe that roasts. When a shop's name carries the roasting in it, the espresso is usually the house's whole reason for being. Variety Coffee Roasters and Sweetleaf Coffee Roasters anchor Greenpoint, Brooklyn Roasting Company does it in Williamsburg, and Kos Kaffe Roasting House does it in Park Slope. A roaster has a reason to make the espresso sing, because the bar is the showroom for the beans they are trying to sell you by the pound. The shot you drink at the counter is the sales pitch for the bag by the register, so the incentive points in exactly the right direction.

Then there are the shops that put espresso in the name and mean it. Ninth Street Espresso inside Threes Brewing in Gowanus is a straight-shot institution, and Stonefruit Espresso + Kitchen builds its Bed-Stuy room around the bar. For a more polished counter, the Devoción and % Arabica rooms in DUMBO are both built to show off a shot. The look of these rooms is part of the pitch, but do not let the marble fool you in either direction: the polish only counts if the cup backs it up, and at these counters it generally does.

Worth knowing the difference between a tasting counter and a fast window. Some of these are places to sit and pay attention, the kind of careful room that fills our Connoisseur lane. If you would rather settle in, Sit & Wonder in Prospect Heights and Coffee Project New York in Fort Greene both reward the time. For the curious-at-home crowd, the same care that makes these shots good is what our pieces on home espresso and the accessories worth owning are chasing.

One last test you can run yourself, no expertise required. Order a cortado and a glass of water, sit at the bar, and watch whether the barista weighs the dose and times the pull. If they do, you are in the right kind of room, and the bag of beans by the register is probably worth taking home. If you want to know where those beans come from before you buy, we followed that thread in where Brooklyn's roasters source. Espresso done with intent is not rare in Brooklyn. You just have to know which counters take it seriously, and now you do.