In 1986, a woman opened a six-seat café in Gramercy Park. She was sourcing ingredients from upstate New York farms and calling it farm-to-table before that phrase meant anything to anyone. One week, the New York Times came in. The next day there was a line down the block. She called her husband off the construction site to come help.
That café was Friend of a Farmer. It's still there — forty years on Irving Place, same spirit, same sourcing instincts. If you've eaten there, you already know why.
Taylor Morabito grew up with that place. His mom built it. He and his siblings run it now, two locations and building toward a third.
When you walk into Friend of a Farmer today, you're walking into four decades of a New York family doing things the right way — seasonal, unhurried, honest about where everything comes from.
About a year ago, Taylor switched to Joe Coffee.
Not because of a sales pitch. He'd been drinking our iced coffee every morning from a café near his apartment — just a regular, before he was ever a partner. When it came time to make a change, he already knew where he was going.
What neither of us knew until Taylor came in for a tasting: our founder Jonathan Rubinstein had been a Friend of a Farmer regular going back further than Joe Coffee even existed. Two New York families, running parallel for decades, before they ever formally worked together.
That's not a detail that ends up in a contract. It's the kind of thing you find out sitting across a table from someone and realizing you've been in each other's orbit the whole time.
Some partnerships make sense on paper. This one made sense before anyone signed anything.
Good Neighbors is an ongoing series about the businesses and people in Joe Coffee's community.
