Coffee Project New York | Chelsea

The deconstructed latte is the order that carries this brand’s name, and Chelsea is one of the rooms where you can get it, served as its component parts rather than as a single finished cup. Coffee Project New York started in 2015 in the East Village, founded by two women, and now runs across New York City, from Manhattan into Brooklyn and Queens with a roastery, an academy and a consulting arm attached.

Direct trade coffee, roasted in house

The coffee is sustainably roasted direct trade, chosen for cup quality and for social impact, and it moves in every direction at once: across the bar, into retail bags, out through subscriptions and wholesale. The drinks list stays tight around it, with deconstructed lattes, pour-overs, nitro cold brew and straight espresso doing most of the work.

Beans are the throughline rather than a sideline, which is why the retail shelf sits so close to the counter. A cup at the bar and a bag for home are treated as the same decision, and the brew gear on sale, drawn from competition equipment and design-award lists, follows the same logic.

A counter attached to a coffee school

The academy shapes the tone of the room. Coffee Project New York Academy is an SCA-certified training campus for professionals and enthusiasts, running Barista Skills, a Coffee Tasting Intensive and a Pour Over Intensive, and the vocabulary carries into the café: learning pathways, workshops, sensory training.

In practice that means a service style closer to demonstration than to speed. The sequence is simple enough, espresso drinks, manual brewing, cold coffee, then beans to take home, but the staff are trained to explain any part of it if you ask. Food is not the reason to come; the coffee is the whole proposition, and the wider business runs to wholesale accounts and consulting alongside the cafés.

Order the deconstructed latte first

Take the deconstructed latte first. It is the drink most tied to the brand’s reputation and it suits the teaching personality, turning a familiar milk drink into something you taste in parts before it is put together.

For black coffee, the pour-over is the next step, and it connects straight to the Pour Over Intensive taught by the same company. Nitro cold brew is the cold order, poured for texture rather than as a sweetened iced coffee. Finish with a bag of beans, since the roasting programme is the reason the drinks taste the way they do, and the same coffees go to cafés, wholesale accounts and home subscriptions.