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If Captain Hook needed a little pick-me-up after a busy day of pillaging and looting, chances are good he would find his way to ninth street espresso, despite the fact that his claw might just cause a bit of trouble with a demitasse cup. The only java house in town with its own cup-and-saucer emblazoned Jolly Roger flag, ninth street espresso seems to imagine itself as a caffeine-fueled pirate nation with its own strict and Shopsinesque legal code: store rules include no cell phones, no pets, and no half-decaf/half-regular drinks. Yet observing and respecting the shop's unique culture is a small price to pay for some of the very finest coffee to be found anywhere in the city.
Ninth Street Espresso's beans all come from Counter Culture Coffee, a widely-celebrated sustainable artisanal roaster in Durham, North Carolina that also supplies the spotted pig, Franny's, Café Grumpy, and the tasting room. But fantastic beans–and Counter Culture's beans are genuinely terrific–only account for a portion of the success of an espresso shot; the rest is pure methodology. At ninth street espresso, a triple dose of ground beans (21 grams versus 7 grams) are tamped and extracted for each shot. What results is a deeply ruddy cup of java with a nutty crema and a depth of aromatic flavors like anise and mace, the likes of which we have tasted nowhere else. This is an exceedingly good cup of coffee.
It also makes wonderful lattes and cappuccinos, as well as very fine iced drinks. My personal favorite is the iced americano ($2.50), which retains all of the richness and complexity of the hot version. HungryMan is partial to the iced latte ($4.25), but in general, everything on ninth street espresso's very short menu is superb. This holds true at the location near Avenue C, as well as at the new shop inside Chelsea Market. The only downside to the café's shared retail area inside Chelsea Market is that it cannot enforce its own separatist pirate legal code in the common space. But nevermind–the ninth street espresso flag still flies over the heads of the mostly pierced and bearded baristas, and if you squint, you can just picture them all with peg legs and eyepatches, even if no one is forced to walk the plank for sending a text message.
ninth street espresso, 700 East Ninth Street (at Avenue C), and 75 Ninth Avenue, 212-358-9225.
