Cafe con Libros

Cappuccino, hot chocolate and a wall of books

The espresso machine sits at the front and the beans go through a hand grinder before they are tamped and pulled, with the milk chosen at the counter. Cappuccino is the drink to ask for, hot chocolate the alternative when the weather argues for it, and a pastry display is set out alongside them. Cafe con Libros has worked this way in Crown Heights, Brooklyn since 2017, an intersectional feminist bookstore and coffee shop built to center women, girls and non-binary people. Owner Kalima DeSuze treats the coffee as the bridge rather than the business: people may not buy a book every day, but they will buy a coffee, and the wait for it is where a conversation starts.

A corridor of shelves

Floor-to-ceiling shelves run along both walls and turn the room into a corridor of stories, with colorful handbags set among the books. The chairs face two ways, out toward the street and Crown Heights going past, or in toward the shelves for browsing and talking, which is a fair description of how the place gets used. Coffee, books and programming hold it together. Author talks, book clubs, film screenings and game nights fill the calendar, and the space can be rented for other gatherings. It is a bookstore café rather than a beverage counter, and the difference shows in how long people stay.

Order the cappuccino, then take a chair

Start with the cappuccino, the most specific order in the house and the one the counter is set up for, ground and tamped to order and finished with the milk you choose. The shop makes little of roasters or origins. What the coffee is for here is the time it buys you in the room. Hot chocolate is the other warm drink worth naming and suits the same purpose, and the pastry display is there when something is wanted alongside. After that the order is really about where you sit, facing the street or facing the shelves with a feminist title pulled down from them. Time Out New York has named Cafe con Libros one of the city's best bookstore cafés, which is a fair account of what it does: coffee good enough to keep you there, and a room that expects you to stay.