PrintWhen Pops applied to be a dishwasher at the newly opening Café Bagutta, little did he know that his face would soon grace the backs of menus and even the cell phone background of the café’s owner, Marc Bagutta.
“I saw in him what I wanted the café to be, so I dressed him up for the picture—I did everything for the picture,” Bagutta explains in a thick Parisian accent. The elderly African-American man sports a big smile, a fat cigar and an old-fashioned suit, and he smokes in front of Bagutta’s walls. “We want to bring back Harlem, uptown, Columbia to the way it was in the 1920s,” he says. Café Bagutta is his attempt to accomplish this.
Rare are the coffeehouses that take a purely utilitarian approach to serving up joe. Rather, the concept of a café is one that conjures many images, be they creativity or pretension, history or trendiness. And the owners of such cafés work carefully to create environments that encourage such impressions.
“Café image” became a corporate buzzword last summer when, after being forced to close 800 stores because of financial difficulties, corporate giant Starbucks opened a pilot café in Seattle named 15th Ave. Coffee and Tea, ironically aimed at mimicking the independent coffeehouses the corporate giant had made a career of squashing. Devoid of the conspicuous green logo, the pilot emphasized its “neighborhood connections,” serving wine and beer and hosting community poetry readings.
Morningside cafés are far from immune to the identity crises that plague both national chains and local outposts. “It’s all about the image—it’s all about the interior, the look of the place,” Bagutta says. “I want to bring back the idea of a café as not just a place for coffee and cappuccinos, but as a melting pot. … It was designed with the idea that it is an open space.”
A fashion designer, Bagutta has spent considerable creative energy crafting the image of his café as a cosmopolitan breakfast place. He explains how he carefully picks artwork on the walls to reflect his taste—the café is currently featuring New York artist Ian Crofts and will soon switch to an exhibit featuring black-and-white photos from the 1920s. The café also plays music based on a different theme every day, playing everything from R&B to jazz.
“I would like to think we are starting a Harlem renaissance,” Bagutta says, possibly alluding to history.
Nearby competitor Society Coffee also turns to Harlem for its inspiration. Owner Karl Williams describes the reason he decided to open Society Coffee: “This neighborhood really could use a gathering place ... where people can meet and come together and enjoy great food, a very casual, open environment,” Williams says.
Society’s efforts to establish itself as a neighborhood gathering place are apparent from its wide selection of old magazines, board games, local flyers, and giant center tables. “It connects to the name. Society—that’s what you have here. The community tables always made sense to me in that regard,” Williams says.
He also identifies the tables as a pointed attempt to foster conversation. “You could be sitting next to just about anybody,” he says. “This neighborhood has so many great people of all different ethnicities and backgrounds.”
Bagutta and Williams have directed everything from their interior designs to their menus and soundtracks in order to craft specific images for their recently opened cafés. But Hungarian Pastry Shop owner Panagiotis Binioris has history on his side.
Binioris has owned the café since 1966 when he bought it from a Hungarian couple. His former partner Yanni Posnakoff, an artist, is responsible for the unique and colorful paintings that adorn the windows. Other than that, Binioris has done little to actively establish an image except watch the café increase in charm and solidify its reputation as a stomping ground for the Morningside intelligentsia and pseudo-intelligentsia.
Even the origins of the famous graffiti-covered bathroom, filled with Sharpied bits of wit and insight, are unknown. “It started very slow, but now the whole thing is covered,” Binioris says. “People just do it.”
That’s not to say that the Hungarian doesn’t play up its image at all. A wall opposite the counter displays the many books that have been written in the small café. And, indeed, Binioris lists the café’s core customer base as “writers, philosophers, artists,” though he asserts that “people come here from everywhere—it doesn’t matter what their education is.”
Perhaps the victory of a café is the point at which an owner stops defining what he or she wants it to be and customers determine what the space will look like (à la graffitied bathrooms). Despite Williams’s and Bagutta’s respective commitments to establishing an “open space,” it’s up to the people of the neighborhood to determine where they will bond over a morning cup of coffee or attempt the next great American novel. And Hungarian is proof that it may not be the themed playlists and lighting techniques that do the trick.