Starbucks Series Part Two: The Outer Boroughs

Outerborough Starbucks

This Bronx Starbucks is a neighborhood joint, no other way to describe it. There are walk-able shops in the vicinity, a supermarket, shoe repair, hardware store, tax preparer, optometrists, pharmacists, lawyers, dentists and other real services. If need be, you could survive in the area without a car by just doing everything on foot. But it might also mean using iceberg lettuce in your salad on occasion.

Cooking at home however is not the only option. The neighborhood has a slew of restaurants, none of them great, but often this is just how it goes. At least four varieties of Asian in addition to Mexican, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Irish, real pizza, a couple of kosher eateries, diners, two soft serve yogurts, and a Jewish delicatessen- one of the last in the city. The pizza is pretty good.

And except for the Starbucks, they all deliver.

Minutes from the glamour and lure of “downtown”, which is how we refer to Manhattan from the Bronx, this outer borough Starbucks is having none of that. To begin with, although it sits on a sunny corner, the windows are always noticeably dirty, which doesn’t make the afternoon pick-me-up of a double shot of whipped grande mocha seem so very appealing. It is not trendy. And yet people go in.

Once inside, the smell of the signature, acrid brew tells you that the familiar, bitter caffeine of the brand lives here and decaf too. This is not the Upper West Side. The demographic is relaxed, no Manhattan Masters & Mistresses of the Universe. You don't feel like you're interviewing for a job when you order your coffee. Exceptionally weird characters are at a minimum. There usually is at least a little bit of a line and a bunch of students, retirees, a few baby carriages and one or two roaming toddlers doing their cute toddling thing and telling their mommies what they want to order, but clearly this is neighborhood all the way. After three the teachers come in.

Not a destination Starbucks, many of the customers are scruffy and shlump around in sneakers and old sweat pants. The barristas are just kids working after school. There is not a whole lot of cache or élan. It is not always sunny. Outside  a couple of benches might be taken up at a certain time of day by health aides and their charges, the aides screaming into their phones as seen through the large windows. Occasionally, like very rarely and usually in the summer, a couple of tourists will have made their way uptown to this most northern reach of the boroughs and are huddling close together at the window, intently poking at their GPS and wondering how they got there.

This is dangerously starting to sound like a somewhat suspect riff on “Our Town,” Bronx style, but please rest assured the neighborhood is really quite urban, very real and gritty, people tend to look gritty, urban and real, it's exceptionally diverse in population yet like Grovers Corners, friendly for the most part. There are smart phones and laptops everywhere, not enough free time, no one marries the boy next door, and subways, buses,highways and large public schools nearby. 

To the best of my knowledge I have never seen anyone produce a little gold rimmed compact to powder their nose then smooth their perfectly ironed blond hair in this particular Starbucks, though I am not saying this couldn’t happen- I’ve lived long enough to know anything is possible. Surprisingly though, dirty windows and smudged counters and all, the coffee is damned good! Once in a while there can be an aberration of course and you could wind up with some truly sad, tepid, watery swill, because as we all know, stuff happens.

So please keep this information to yourself- the place does not wish to be discovered. Then again, would anyone really want to venture up to this northern tip of the city to chance a lukewarm, thin cappuccino? Go Tell whomever you want. No problem.  It’s the Bronx.