Foster Sundry

Espresso beside the butcher and cheese cases

The espresso counter shares the room with whole-animal butchery, cheese, pantry shelves and a kitchen, which is the point of Foster Sundry in Bushwick. It is not built like a coffee bar that happens to sell food. It works more like a neighbourhood market where coffee is one station in a larger daily shop, beside sausages, jerky, produce, canned goods, pasta, spices, snacks and the cheese counter. The house pulls espresso and makes a coffee orange tonic, a drink that fits the room because it is quick, portable and a little sharper than the usual takeaway order.

The founder’s background in cheese gives the place its centre of gravity: twenty years in the trade, with time at Murray’s Cheese, the Artisanal Cheese Center, a Brooklyn butcher shop, Whole Foods and Slow Food’s university in Pollenzo. That explains why the counter reads as food-first, practical and broad rather than as a narrow café programme.

A bright market running several counters at once

The room is bright and functional, with large front windows and a service flow that makes sense only if several things are happening at the same time. Someone is ordering a sandwich, someone is looking into the meat case, someone is choosing cheese, and someone else is leaving with coffee. The smell is part cured meat, part espresso, which tells you quickly what kind of stop this is. There is indoor and outdoor seating, but the better way to think about the place is as a counter-service market with room to pause, not a long-session café. The kitchen turns through breakfast burritos, biscuit sandwiches, soups, salads, grain bowls, burgers and made-to-order sandwiches, while the shelves carry the pantry goods that turn a coffee stop into a small grocery run. It has been open since late 2015, long enough for the regulars to shape the rhythm.

Coffee orange tonic, then something from the kitchen

Start with the coffee orange tonic if the walk calls for something cold and clean-edged. It is the named drink here, and it makes more sense than asking the counter to perform like a single-origin brew bar. The better order is coffee plus food: a breakfast burrito when it is that kind of morning, or a biscuit sandwich when the coffee wants something buttery and substantial beside it. The heavier sandwiches are part of the draw too, especially the Porchettaboutit and the San Gennaro, both closer to a market lunch than a café snack. Gluten-free bread is part of the sandwich setup for at least some orders. If there is a first-visit order, make it the coffee orange tonic and a breakfast burrito, then look at the cheese case before leaving.