You’ll need a map for the city’s latest Starbucks.
On Friday, the Seattle coffee giant opens its latest location in NYC, a nearly 23,000-square-foot retail space where it will serve up coffee, pastries and even cocktails, as well as roast beans on site.
Dubbed Starbucks Reserve Roastery and located at 61 Ninth Ave. in the Meatpacking District, it’s the fourth such location to open worldwide, following Seattle, Shanghai and Milan. More openings are to follow in Chicago and Tokyo next year.
The New York edition features not one but two coffee bars that offer Starbucks’ premium line of coffee, Reserve, in seven brewing methods — pour over, Chemex, coffee press, siphon, espresso, Clover and cold brewing — alongside a selection of pastries and sandwiches. At a “scoop bar,” customers can choose from 14 rotating coffees to take home to brew. At a Starbucks Reserve cold brew bar, they can get coffee to go in growlers.
And there’s an actual bar, the aperitivo-inspired Arriviamo. Starbucks partnered with famed mixologist Julia Momose for a menu of coffee- and tea-infused cocktails, like the Nocino Notte (cold brew coffee, gin and black truffle salt). The bar will also serve wine, beer and bites like cornetti sandwiches and pizza al taglio.
All of the food is from Princi, a Milan bakery that recently opened its first New York City location in midtown, with breads, pizza, cornetti, focaccia and more baked on-site in one of four cast-iron ovens.
The centerpiece is the roasting operation, from a conveyor system inspired by meat hooks that carries bags of green coffee beans to a 30-foot-tall copper cask where they begin the roasting process. According to Starbucks, the Roastery is home to the largest fully operational coffee roasting plant in Manhattan, and it is expected to roast more than 1.5 million pounds of coffee a year that will be served in the Roastery and packaged off-site.
“What we’re doing special here is we’re roasting — this is an actual manufacturing plant,” said Jill Enomoto, one of Starbucks’ in-house designers.
But like any coffee shop, the Roastery is designed with people lingering and working in mind, with plenty of seats at the bars, wood benches lining the windows, tables and even a fireplace.
“I’m excited to have people immersed in the experience, stay a little longer,” said Enomoto, whose favorite area is the second-floor library for the view of the entire space. “It was created to bring a connection between the roasters and customers.”
In a borough where Starbucks is on almost every corner, it’s not too surprising that the Roastery is opening across the street from another Starbucks. But staff don’t see this as a redundancy.
“It’s all about the experience,” said Arlene De La Cruz, an assistant director at the Roastery. “If there’s a customer that wants an experience where all five senses are utilized, this is where they might want to come. If they want to come and get something quick, they might want to use that neighborhood store.”
