Hampton Coffee Company

Coffee roasted on the East End

The roast is the company's own. Hampton Coffee Company hand-roasts in small batches on Long Island and serves it across a group of cafés and espresso bars spread through the Hamptons, the North Fork and the East End, of which the Westhampton Beach room is one.

The programme here is an espresso bar with food attached rather than one of the group's larger restaurant-style rooms: coffee alongside a bakery case, breakfast and lunch made in house, and dessert. Retail bags include Coconut Crème and its decaf counterpart, both direct trade.

The branch that set the pattern

This was the second café the company opened, in January 2006, and the first one its founders designed themselves, which gives it a different weight from a later rollout site.

Two decades on it functions as a fixture: the same customers year after year, staff who grew up behind the counter and moved on to college and careers, and a room that has marked weddings and births among its regulars. The wider group has since reached Water Mill, Southampton, Aquebogue, Montauk, Center Moriches, Hampton Bays and Quogue, but this branch keeps its own place in that history and still reads as a neighbourhood room rather than an outpost.

The founders have talked about the wider Westhampton area through its natural resources, its nonprofits and its independent businesses, which is the frame the café has operated in for twenty years rather than a line bolted on afterwards.

Ask for the coffee first

Order at the espresso bar and start with the house roast, brewed or as espresso, since the small-batch roasting is the reason the group exists and the one thing every location shares. If beans are going home, the direct-trade Coconut Crème is the most distinctive thing on the retail shelf, and there is a decaf version of the same.

Food is built to sit next to the cup rather than to compete with it: something from the bakery case in the morning, or the current breakfast and lunch cooking later in the day. A first visit is best kept simple, a coffee and one thing from the case, with the retail shelf as the afterthought on the way out.

The group's other addresses run to larger formats with fuller kitchens, but this one has stayed an espresso bar with food attached, and an order placed here should match that.