Porto Rico Importing Co.

Old-world coffee-store character

Open sacks of beans, tin ceilings and the smell of roasting reaching the sidewalk: Porto Rico Importing Co. still works the way a coffee store worked a century ago. The original New York City shop opened on Bleecker Street in Greenwich Village in 1907, started by an Italian immigrant to serve the surrounding Italian community. The Longo family bought it in 1958, and Peter Longo, a third-generation owner, still lives upstairs in the building where he grew up. That continuity matters: the Bleecker Street shop remains the company’s soul even as it has expanded to other downtown locations, online sales and wholesale accounts.

The appeal is both atmospheric and practical: old-school ceiling fans, hand-painted signage, unground beans in the open, and a retail floor built around coffee, tea and equipment. This is not a modern minimalist café. It reads as an old Italian coffee store with a turn-of-the-century neighborhood rhythm.

Coffee anchors the character

The beans are roasted daily, like a bakery, across more than 130 varieties from around the world. Named origins include Burundi, Kenya, Indonesia, Guatemala and Brazil, plus a rare Panama Finca Santa Teresa Geisha Natural grown at high altitude. The catalogue takes in organic coffees and a 100th Anniversary Blend built from six coffees. Even the name carries coffee-history resonance, since Porto Rico may point to the Italian spelling of Puerto Rico, a popular origin at the turn of the last century.

Service is hybrid. Customers buy beans and tea for home while each location also runs a coffee bar for immediate drinks, so the counter sits inside a wider retail floor rather than a stand-alone café. Shelves support home brewing with moka pots, Chemex brewers, La Pavoni machines, espresso machines, filters and syrups. The tea side is substantial too: handmade wall shelving holds glass jars of loose-leaf teas, from oolong, chai and scented teas to white teas, Ceylon mint, Darjeelings, rooibos, Tanzanian Usambara and Assam Koilamari.

Order the espresso, then take in the room

Start at the coffee bar and treat the store itself as part of the order. Espresso suits a place built on daily roasting, long-running bean retail and Italian-American coffee-store lineage. If you are buying for home, the range is the point: more than 130 coffees, named single origins, organic selections and blends such as the 100th Anniversary make this different from a cup-only stop.

Then take in the room deliberately. The old signage, tin ceiling, ceiling fans, sacks of beans, wall jars of tea and the coffee aroma are the experience, and they keep the original shop central to the company’s identity. Its reputation rests less on formal awards than on longevity, in-house roasting, breadth of selection and a neighborhood role that has lasted from 1907 through several generations of ownership.