Handcraft Coffee

151 East 77th Street

SPECIALTY

Handcraft Coffee is a specialty coffee shop located in New York. Check in here with the Pulled Coffee app to earn real cash rewards. Specialty shops count toward all challenges including Pulled 50, Pulled 100, and Pulled 300.

Handcraft Coffee sits on East 77th between Lexington and Third, a block from the Q line on the Upper East Side. The shop is small, five seats inside, with a sidewalk bench for the rest. The bar pulls strong, the chai latte runs as the regulars' drink of choice, and the case turns over with chocolate pecan croissants and savory doughnuts most mornings. Hours start at six on weekdays for the pre-work crowd headed downtown, seven on weekends for the brunch-and-walk routine. The room reads tucked-in, the kind of UES corner shop that locals defend without quite explaining why. Order the chai latte if you came because that is the drink Handcraft regulars have been ordering for years. Order an espresso and a chocolate pecan croissant if you came for the morning UES move and want it dense.

About New York

Joe Coffee opened on Waverly Place in Greenwich Village in 2003, founded by Jonathan Rubinstein, and is generally treated as the first specialty cafe in New York City. The opening predated the broader Brooklyn third wave by several years and trained a generation of operators who later opened their own bars across the boroughs. Joe Coffee was instrumental in establishing what became the recognizable Brooklyn-style specialty cafe, even though the founding room sat in Manhattan.

The wave that followed reshaped the city. Cafe Grumpy opened in Greenpoint in 2005, founded by Caroline Bell and Chris Timbrell, and built out a roasting program alongside its retail bars. Abraco opened in the East Village in 2007, founded by Jamie McCormick, and ran a small standing-room counter that became a reference point for espresso discipline. Stumptown Coffee Roasters opened its first New York City location inside the Ace Hotel on West 29th Street in 2009, which marked the moment the West Coast specialty wave fully crossed the country. The Ace Hotel bar still operates and remains one of the most photographed cafes in the city.

Through the 2010s the network thickened. La Colombe, founded by Todd Carmichael in Philadelphia, opened multiple New York City locations from the early 2010s onward. Variety Coffee Roasters built outward from Williamsburg. Devocion, a Colombian-owned operation, opened in Williamsburg with a focus on direct sourcing from Colombia. Sey Coffee opened in Bushwick and runs one of the most technically demanding roasting programs in the country. The result is a city where the top of the specialty market matches anything in Melbourne or Tokyo and where the working bar density across Brooklyn and Manhattan is among the highest in the world.

New York's coffee culture sits inside the broader register of the city: dense, fast, expensive, multilingual. Neighborhood bars in Park Slope or Astoria work as community rooms. Manhattan operators run on commuter and office traffic. The full network covers more than a dozen neighborhoods across four boroughs, and a serious circuit moves through Williamsburg, Greenpoint, the East Village, the West Village, Bushwick, and Long Island City within a single weekend. Prices have climbed steadily since 2015 and a flat white at a central specialty bar in 2026 lands at six to eight dollars.