Koko Lists
Start a new list
Log in
Sign up
← New random battle
Koko Battle
Tap your pick.
Café Grumpy
Café Grumpy opened in 2005, founded by Caroline Bell and Chris Timbrell in Brooklyn's Greenpoint neighborhood, built around a name that pokes fun at exactly the mood most people are in before their first cup — pre-coffee grumpiness, turned into a logo and a brand identity rather than something to apologize for. The Greenpoint original picked up an entirely separate kind of fame a few years after opening: its proximity to Broadway Stages made it a natural filming location, and it became the fictional coffee shop where Hannah Horvath, Ray Ploshansky, and Elijah Krantz worked across HBO's Girls — exposure that turned a neighborhood café into a specific pilgrimage stop for the show's fans, whether or not they'd have found it otherwise. Beyond the television cameo, Café Grumpy grew steadily through the early 2010s, adding a Lower East Side location in 2011, a Midtown spot near Times Square in 2013, and a counter inside Grand Central Terminal's Lexington Passage by 2014 — a real expansion built on the original Greenpoint shop's reputation rather than chasing the show's fame specifically. The original location has also hosted filming for Blue Bloods, Lipstick Jungle, and The Black Donnellys, a filming history that's almost incidental to what built the shop's actual following: a straightforward, well-run specialty coffee program that was good enough to anchor a growing small chain regardless of which cameras happened to show up.
VS
Think Coffee
Think Coffee has anchored Greenwich Village since the mid-2000s, built specifically for the neighborhood it sits in — steps from NYU, in a part of Manhattan with more students per block than almost anywhere else in the city, and a menu and seating plan built accordingly: reliable wifi, long tables, and a lot of outlets, the practical infrastructure of a shop meant to be worked in for hours rather than passed through quickly. The company built its identity early around Fair Trade and organic sourcing, a set of commitments that were still a genuine differentiator in New York coffee culture in the mid-2000s rather than the baseline expectation they've since become across the industry. That positioning helped Think Coffee stand out from both corporate chains and more austere, minimalist specialty shops at a moment when the city's coffee scene was still sorting out what "third-wave" was even going to mean. The Greenwich Village flagship has stayed a genuine campus fixture for NYU students specifically, the kind of place where studying for finals and meeting for a first date happen at adjacent tables without either feeling out of place. That dual identity — serious enough coffee to satisfy people who care, casual enough atmosphere to just camp out in for an afternoon — is a harder balance than it sounds, and it's the main reason the original location has stayed busy for the better part of two decades. For anyone treating a New York coffee crawl as a chance to actually sit and work rather than just collect cups, Think Coffee's Greenwich Village original is built exactly for that.
Next battle
Full comparison
About Café Grumpy
About Think Coffee
Popular Battles
1984 vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
1 votes
Friends vs. Curb Your Enthusiasm
1 votes
Ideogram vs. Sora
1 votes
Navy Pier vs. Bishop Museum
1 votes
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree vs. Skittles
1 votes
George Carlin vs. Oprah Winfrey
1 votes
