Cafe Reggio

The machine against the back wall was built in 1902 and has not pulled a shot in decades, and it is still the first thing anyone notices at Caffè Reggio. Domenico Parisi opened the place on MacDougal Street in 1927 and bought the machine to put in it, and the room has been accumulating Greenwich Village ever since.

Cappuccino and espresso

The order is cappuccino, and it is not an arbitrary choice. The cafe's own history claims it as the first in the United States to serve the drink, with Parisi credited for bringing cappuccino into the American cafe vocabulary in the early 1920s. Everything on the counter follows from that Italian model.

Espresso belongs beside it, not as a specialty item but as the drink the room was built around. The 1902 machine explains the rest: chrome and bronze, an angel on top and dragons at the base, coal-powered originally and converted to gas in the 1970s. It has been retired from service and left exactly where it always stood. Parisi was exacting enough that he would not let anyone else operate it.

A room to stay late in

Caffè Reggio invites lingering because the space has been gathering Village history for nearly a century. It is among the oldest operating coffee shops in New York and has been a haven for writers since the Beat Generation, and the tin ceilings and Italian furnishings make it read as a historic coffeehouse rather than a contemporary cafe.

The furnishings are not decorative gestures. A bench from a Florentine Medici palazzo is used as seating rather than roped off, and a 16th-century painting from the school of Caravaggio hangs above the tables. The cafe's reach goes past its own door as well. It appears in The Godfather Part II, Serpico, Inside Llewyn Davis and The Sun Is Also a Star, and John F. Kennedy made a speech outside it in 1959.

Order the cappuccino first

Order the cappuccino first because it is the drink that carries the claim. It connects the visit to the founding story, to the assertion of being the first cappuccino served in the country, and to the machine on the back wall. Espresso is the other natural short order, since the heritage here is Italian espresso service rather than rotating roasters and brew methods.

The better reason to sit down is continuity. Caffè Reggio has been recognized as part of what makes Greenwich Village itself, including a 2010 Village Award from the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation. Come for the cappuccino, look at the machine, sit with the bench and the painting, and treat the cafe as a piece of New York coffee history still in use.