BUDDIES COFFEE ★10

Most coffee shops are named after a place, a bean or a founder. BUDDIES COFFEE is named after what it wants you to do once you are inside. It began in 2020, in the flattest stretch of the pandemic, on the premise that what people had lost was not caffeine but the ordinary excuse to meet somebody. Five years later a rent increase pushed the shop out of the Brooklyn neighborhood it had become a fixture in — and it reopened in Alphabet City, on the far eastern edge of the East Village, in the part of Manhattan its co-founder walked as a teenager.

Highlights

• This is a relocation, not an expansion. The original room in East Williamsburg closed in May 2025 after the landlord raised the rent past what a small independent could carry. The East Village address is where the same business started over, which is why the shop reads as fully formed rather than newly hatched.
• The coquito latte comes out of a family recipe. Coquito is the Puerto Rican Christmas drink built on coconut cream, condensed milk, warming spices and rum. Co-founder Rachel Nieves took her family’s version, replaced the rum with espresso, and put it on the board all year instead of for three weeks in December.
• They roast their own. The business trades as Buddies Coffee Roasters, and what started as a tiny operation grew into roasting for its own counter — a rarer thing than the marketing on most storefronts suggests.
• Founded by a roaster and a professional skateboarder. Nieves and Taylor Nawrocki are partners in life and in business, and by their own account started the whole thing with a few thousand dollars.
• The neighborhood turned out when it mattered. A tearful video Nieves posted in February 2025 about the rent went far beyond her followers, and New Yorkers showed up in numbers for the last weeks of the Brooklyn shop. Very few cafés get that kind of public referendum on whether they are wanted.
• The address carries a Puerto Rican inheritance. The shop reopened on a Loisaida block a few doors from the Nuyorican Poets Cafe, in a room that had spent years as an Italian café — a Puerto Rican-owned coffee business landing in the exact quarter where Nuyorican culture was written down.

What’s in the cup

The useful fact about this shop is that it roasts. That single decision changes what a small café can be: instead of buying a house blend from a wholesaler and inheriting somebody else’s idea of what espresso should taste like, the people behind the counter own the roast profile and can move it. Buddies grew into roasting rather than launching with it, which is the honest order of things for a business that started with almost no capital and built the equipment list out of what the shop earned.

What the company has never done in detail is publish its sourcing. There is no public origin list, no lot-by-lot transparency page, no harvest notes. If you want to know exactly which farms are in the hopper this month, the answer is to ask at the counter rather than to look it up, and this write-up is not going to invent a supply chain that nobody has described. What is documented is the flavor identity, and it is unambiguous: this is a Puerto Rican shop, and the drinks say so.

The coquito latte is the anchor. Nieves grew up with coquito as a holiday ritual, and the version she serves is her family’s, engineered around espresso instead of rum so it works as a morning drink rather than a party one. A matcha build on the same base followed. Treating a seasonal cultural drink as a permanent fixture is a small act of insistence — it says the culture is not a December novelty to be wheeled out and put away. For the rest of the board, expect an espresso-and-milk shop in the modern New York idiom; the filter and single-origin side of things is not what the shop has made its name on, and it would be a fabrication to promise you a rotating brew bar.

Who’s behind it

Rachel Nieves and Taylor Nawrocki opened Buddies in 2020. She is Puerto Rican and became the roaster; he is a professional skateboarder, which explains why the shop has always sat closer to skate and streetwear culture than to the linen-apron school of specialty coffee. The starting capital was a few thousand dollars. The name was the whole business plan: somewhere to go and meet your buddies, at a moment when that had briefly stopped being possible.

The Brooklyn shop became something more than a café for the neighborhood around it — a Latine-owned business anchoring a district that had been home to the Puerto Rican diaspora for generations before the rents rewrote it. When the landlord’s number came back in early 2025, Nieves recorded a video that said plainly what small operators usually say only to each other: that you feel like you cannot win, that the small people cannot win. It traveled. The shop closed in May 2025 anyway, because sympathy is not a lease.

What happened next is the reason this entry exists. Rather than fold, the pair took the brand across the river to the East Village, which Nieves has described as her teenage stomping ground — the place where getting off the train still feels like coming home. Along the way Buddies has been pulled into the wider cultural conversation too, including a collaboration with the Concepts retail world around the adidas and Bad Bunny orbit, which tells you the shop is read as a culture project as much as a coffee counter.

What kind of visit it suits

Start with the name, because it is not decoration. This is a place built for meeting one person and talking to them. If your plan is coffee with a friend, a first date that needs an exit, a catch-up with somebody you have not seen since they moved uptown, the room is designed around exactly that transaction and the staff are not going to rush you out of it.

The laptop question needs an honest answer rather than a confident one. Buddies has not published a Wi-Fi or laptop policy, and the format — a compact ground-floor storefront on a residential block, run by a small team — is not the format that supports a room full of open screens for hours. Treat it as a talking-and-takeaway shop by default. If you need a guaranteed desk with a socket for a working afternoon, this is not the safe pick in the East Village, and you should ask when you walk in rather than assume.

Takeaway is the other strong scenario, and geography supports it: this is a residential quarter with a park a short walk north, so a cup carried out has somewhere obvious to go. Coming alone works too, in the counter-and-a-book sense rather than the open-plan-office sense. And there is a specific visit worth naming: if you have never had coquito, this is the shop where trying it is the point of the trip, not an afterthought.

The room and the atmosphere

The space had a previous life as an Italian café, and the bones are what that implies — a small East Village storefront rather than a converted warehouse, with the seat count that comes with a narrow Manhattan ground floor. Nobody should arrive expecting a hall. When the shop is busy the counter is the center of gravity and the sound level rises with it; when it is not, this is one of the quieter blocks in the neighborhood, because there is no subway entrance nearby to feed a constant stream of foot traffic.

The visual identity is skate-adjacent and merch-forward — logo goods are part of the business, not an afterthought — and the crowd it draws skews toward the neighborhood’s creative and Latine communities rather than the office lunch trade. What the room does not have is the anonymous polish of a chain: this is a shop where the owners are identifiable people with a public story, and the regulars know it. That is the atmosphere in one line — a neighborhood room with a name attached to it.

What goes with the coffee

The food side is deliberately not the headline, and the public record does not describe a full kitchen. Think of the counter offering as the usual companions to a drink rather than as a menu you plan a meal around: this is not a brunch destination and does not try to be one. The East Village is dense with places that will cook you eggs; Buddies is where you go for the cup, and the pastry is there because a cup wants company.

What the drinks board covers better than most is the non-espresso side, because the coquito idea extends into matcha as well. If you are with somebody who does not drink coffee, the shop has thought about them more carefully than a lot of specialty counters do.

When to come

This is a residential-rhythm shop, not a commuter one. There is no station mouth outside pushing a rush-hour wave through the door, so the sharpest peaks are the weekend late-morning stretch, when Alphabet City wakes up slowly and everybody in it wants the same table at the same time. Weekday mid-mornings and the flat middle of the afternoon are the reliable windows if you want to hear the person opposite you.

There is also a seasonal spike worth knowing about. Coquito is a Christmas drink by tradition, and the run-up to the holidays brings people who specifically want it made properly, by someone whose family recipe it is. If you would rather try it without a line, come for it in a month when nobody else is thinking about it — which is the whole argument for serving it year-round in the first place.

Getting there

The shop sits in Alphabet City, the eastern edge of the East Village, in the quarter long known as Loisaida. This is one of the few parts of Manhattan where the subway is genuinely a walk rather than a step: the nearest options are the Second Avenue station on the F train and the First Avenue station on the L train, and either one leaves you around ten minutes on foot through low-rise residential blocks. Crosstown and avenue buses run closer than the trains do.

The simplest landmarks are Tompkins Square Park a few blocks north and the Nuyorican Poets Cafe a few doors along the same block. If you are coming down from Midtown, the honest advice is to plan the walk into the trip rather than treat it as an error — the approach through Loisaida is a large part of why the location suits this particular business.

Good to know

The shop is young at this address, and that has consequences for what can be promised in writing. Buddies has a loud public presence on social platforms and a thin one on its own website, so the current drinks lineup, any seasonal releases and the day-to-day details live on the feed rather than in a fixed page. Anything you read anywhere about seating, outdoor space or whether dogs are welcome — including here — should be confirmed at the door, because none of it has been stated publicly by the business.

The other thing to hold in mind is context. This café exists at this address because a landlord in another borough decided a long-running independent could pay more. That is the ordinary physics of small business in New York, and it is the reason the neighborhood response to Buddies has an edge of protectiveness to it. You are not walking into a brand rollout. You are walking into a business that got knocked over, got up, and moved to the block where one of its owners grew up.

Questions and answers

Is this the same Buddies that was in Williamsburg?

Yes. The Brooklyn shop closed in May 2025 after a rent increase, and the East Village room is the same business restarted rather than a new branch. The founders, the roasting and the signature drinks came with it.

Do they roast their own coffee?

Yes — the business trades as Buddies Coffee Roasters and roasts for its own counter. What it has not published is a detailed origin or sourcing list, so specifics about farms and lots are a question for the barista rather than something you can look up.

What should I order if I only come once?

The coquito latte. It is the drink the shop is known for, it is a family recipe with the rum swapped for espresso, and unlike almost everywhere else it is available all year rather than only around Christmas.

Can I work here with a laptop?

Assume not, and ask. No Wi-Fi or laptop policy has been made public, and the format is a compact neighborhood storefront rather than a workspace café. If a full working session is the goal, pick somewhere that advertises itself for it.

Is it good for meeting somebody?

That is the shop’s entire founding premise — the name refers to meeting your buddies. Conversation is the default use of the room, and the scale of the space suits two people far better than eight.

How far is the nearest subway?

Roughly a ten-minute walk. Alphabet City is the classic Manhattan gap in the subway map; the F train and the L train both leave you several blocks west of the door, so build the walk into your plan.

Is there anything for people who do not drink coffee?

Yes. The matcha side of the board is properly considered, including a version that borrows the same coquito idea, so a non-coffee companion is not stuck with an afterthought.

What was in the space before?

An Italian café occupied the room for years before Buddies took the lease at the end of 2024. Longtime East Village residents will recognize the frontage even though what happens behind it has completely changed.

Why does a Puerto Rican coffee shop being here matter?

Because of where here is. This quarter of the East Village is Loisaida, named by the Nuyorican community that made it, and a Puerto Rican-owned roaster reopening on this block is a continuation of that story rather than a coincidence of real estate.

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