Plowshares Coffee Roasters

A roaster with a counter in West Harlem

The coffee is the company's own. Plowshares started roasting in 2008 in Hillburn, New York, grew up as a wholesale business, and the West Harlem room is where that roast meets a counter rather than a delivery van. Espresso, batch brew and cold brew carry the list, with a wider hot and iced range around them, and the same coffee leaves the building as retail bags, subscriptions and wholesale orders. That order of operations is worth knowing before you order: this is a roasting company with a café attached, not a café that buys its beans in. The Broadway shop is the flagship of the pair; the Harlem room is the one that doubles as a roastery and is set up as a community space where coffee, food and music share the floor.

Sunday Sessions turn the café into a jazz room

Once a week the room changes job. Sunday Sessions run as an intimate jam rather than a booked concert, on a hundred-year-old Kurtzman piano with a Gretsch drum set and a Polytone amp standing by for guitarists, and after the first set local musicians are invited to sit in. Beer, wine and cider are poured beside the coffee and food while the music runs, so the café works as an evening room as much as a morning one. A monthly event called Free Bread brings more New York players into the same corner. The community-space description is easy to make and hard to earn, and the music programme is the part that earns it.

Order the house roast, then stay a while

Start with espresso for the roast at its most concentrated, batch brew for the everyday read on it, cold brew when the weather argues for it. Then take a bag home, because the argument for drinking coffee at a roastery is that the same coffee is stacked behind the counter, and a subscription is that argument extended. On an ordinary weekday the appeal is plainer: a spacious, work-friendly room with Wi-Fi and seating outside, used by Harlem and Morningside Heights as somewhere to sit for an hour. Come on a Sunday for the version of the room people talk about, and midweek if you would rather hear yourself think.