Funny Library Coffee Shop

La Colombe fills the cups here, drip and cold brew, poured in a room got up as a library that has no interest in being quiet. Funny Library Coffee Shop is Virgin Hotels' own coffee format, on the ground floor of Virgin Hotels New Orleans on Baronne Street, and Virgin sums the idea up as caffeine, community and comedy.

La Colombe coffee and a case of light bites

The coffee has one clear name behind it. La Colombe supplies the beans, and the two orders that define the counter are drip coffee for anything hot and cold brew for anything else. Iced jasmine tea is the alternative worth knowing, served in compostable packaging. Food stays at café scale, pastries and light bites rather than a full kitchen, which suits a room people use for an hour at a time between other things. It is a coffee counter with a lounge attached rather than a restaurant with coffee at the end of it.

A library that talks back

The room is the reason it works. Curated books and games fill the shelves, and the whole conceit is a library with the silence taken out: dark wood and a classic-library frame, then eclectic furnishings, mixed patterns and bright colours pushed over the top of it. Nothing about it is hushed, which is the joke in the name. It opened with the hotel in 2021 and has settled into three jobs at once, coffee shop, hotel lounge and communal workspace. Wi-Fi, a kid-friendly and pet-friendly policy and enough seating to spread out make the middle of a weekday the most useful time to arrive; mornings run busy.

Start with the drip, then find a book

Order La Colombe drip for the most direct version of the coffee, or cold brew when New Orleans decides otherwise, which it usually does. Iced jasmine tea covers the order for anyone off coffee. Add a pastry from the case and carry it to a table rather than eating at the counter, because the point of the place is the sitting rather than the queue. Then treat the shelves as part of the order: pick a book or a game, settle into the furniture and use the room the way it was built to be used, as a lobby-level living room open to anyone who walks in.