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Coffee Booths
Coffee Booths started as a kitchen-counter experiment. Selden couple Ronnie and Melissa Booth left their corporate jobs — Ronnie had worked as a restaurant manager, Melissa for a fabric-making company — to test out a passion project in their own hometown, mixing coffee with ingredients like Kit Kats, Nutella, Rice Krispie Treats, and Junior Mints in their home kitchen before ever opening a storefront. That experimentation became a real café at 226 Middle Country Road in 2015, built directly around the flavor combinations the couple had been refining before they had a business at all. That candy-and-dessert-forward approach to coffee sets Coffee Booths apart from the more restrained, single-origin-focused roasters found elsewhere on Long Island — this is a shop built for people who want their coffee to taste like a treat first and a caffeine delivery system second, and it's leaned into that identity rather than chasing the third-wave, minimalist aesthetic more common among newer specialty shops. The approach has clearly connected with the Selden community: Coffee Booths has won Bethpage's Best of Long Island award for Best Coffeehouse every year since opening, a streak that reflects sustained local loyalty rather than a single good year. Rather than roasting in-house, Coffee Booths sources its beans from Aldo's Coffee Company in Greenport — a notable choice that ties two of Long Island's better-regarded independent coffee businesses together, with Aldo's decades of roasting experience underpinning the base coffee that the Booths then build their flavored drinks on top of. That partnership lets Coffee Booths focus its own energy on drink development and flavor experimentation rather than splitting attention between roasting and recipe work. The Booths' own path into the coffee business — leaving stable corporate careers to chase a homemade idea in their own kitchen — is a genuinely common origin story among small, beloved local coffee shops, but the couple's specific commitment to a hometown location and a flavor-forward menu has let Coffee Booths build a following distinct from the area's more purist roasters. Regulars come specifically for drinks they can't get anywhere else on the Island, not for a particular origin or roast profile. For a Long Island coffee list, Coffee Booths is the essential "coffee as dessert, done consistently well" entry — a Selden café built by a husband-and-wife team out of home-kitchen experiments, now a repeat Best of Long Island winner serving Aldo's-roasted coffee dressed up with Kit Kats, Nutella, and Rice Krispie Treats.
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Aldo's Coffee
Aldo's Coffee has fueled residents and visitors of Greenport since 1987, making it one of the longest-continuously-running specialty coffee businesses anywhere on Long Island. Founder Aldo Maiorana, who was born in Sicily and raised in France starting at age nine, built the café around a European-style approach to coffee and baking — house-roasted beans alongside homemade biscotti and scones — at a time when that kind of deliberate, craft-focused café culture barely existed on the North Fork. Over more than three decades, Aldo's grew from a single Greenport storefront into a genuine wholesale supplier, providing coffee to numerous restaurants and businesses across the North Fork, the Hamptons, and beyond. That wholesale reach gave Aldo's an outsized influence on the broader East End coffee scene relative to its size — a meaningful number of other restaurants' coffee programs trace back to beans roasted at the same Front Street operation Maiorana started roasting out of decades earlier. In August 2023, after nearly 36 years running the business, Maiorana decided to retire and sold the café to four friends who'd been living and raising their families on the East End — a transition that could easily have diluted or reinvented a nearly four-decade-old identity, but by most local accounts didn't. A year-later feature on the transition described the new ownership group as having created "something special" in Greenport while keeping the café's core identity intact, rather than rebranding it into something unrecognizable to longtime regulars. That continuity through an ownership change is genuinely notable in a specialty coffee landscape where founder-led shops often struggle to survive a transition to new owners without losing what made them distinct in the first place. Aldo's has kept its USDA organic sourcing and fresh-roasted, delivered-within-24-hours standard intact under the new ownership, preserving the practical commitments that built its wholesale reputation across three East End decades rather than treating the founder's departure as an opportunity to cut corners. The specific fact that four friends, rather than a single successor or an outside coffee company, bought the business together also matters for how Aldo's has stayed rooted in Greenport rather than becoming a satellite location of a larger regional chain — a group purchase by people already living on the East End is a structurally different kind of transition than an acquisition by an investor group looking to scale the brand outward, and it's part of why the café's identity has stayed tied specifically to Greenport rather than expanding aggressively since 2023. For a Long Island coffee list, Aldo's Coffee is the essential "nearly four-decade Greenport institution" entry — a European-style café and wholesale roaster that Aldo Maiorana built from scratch in 1987 and that's continued operating on its own established standards under new ownership since 2023, still supplying restaurants across the North Fork and Hamptons from the same Front Street storefront.
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