In Sanio's childhood living room in Bosnia, his mother boiled coffee slow for the friends who came over, the way you make Turkish coffee, and let it settle before she poured it. When the cups were empty, everyone turned them over, and the grounds ran down the sides in shapes his mother's friends read like a palm. "It's like reading a palm," he says, "but with the coffee." Sanio, playing nearby with his toys, waited every time for that part.
He's been behind the counter at Joe for a year and a half, but coffee has been sharing his attention with something else entirely. Last July, almost by accident, he started his own theater production company. The roles he was getting elsewhere were fine, he says, but he wanted to work on material he actually loved, so he produced a play himself. Three more followed. He's now directing his fourth, about a man working through his life in a therapist's office, staged because a Joe regular introduced him to the person who wrote it.
He trained in Los Angeles first, then moved to New York in 2017 for better teachers. One of them, old-school and Russian-trained, told him, "Focus less on technique and more on living your life. Experience everything. Experience the moment."
He recently left Bushwick for the Upper West Side. There's a coffee spot around the corner from his new place where he gets his own espresso most mornings, before he comes in to make everyone else's. At Joe, he takes it the same way, straight with no milk, because it's the only way to actually taste it, he says.
Ask him for a favorite corner of New York and he'll name a few, then wave off the question. "The whole city," he says, "is just a playground."
