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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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East Coast Roast
East Coast Roast began in 2012 in the most unassuming way a coffee company can start: retired NYPD officer Richard Comuniello, who'd spent his career searching for what he calls the "ultimate" cup of coffee, began roasting his own carefully selected beans out of his Long Island home. What started as a personal project for a former police officer with strong opinions about coffee has since grown into a small-batch artisan roasting company operating out of Island Park. Comuniello runs the business as a family operation, working alongside his wife Maryann and their three sons — a genuinely family-run structure that's stayed intact as the company has grown from a home-roasting hobby into a working small-batch roastery with retail distribution. That family-first framing isn't just branding: East Coast Roast's own materials describe the company's mission specifically as providing "the finest locally roasted single-origin coffee at a price point any family could afford," a value proposition that reflects Comuniello's own background as a career civil servant rather than a coffee-industry veteran chasing a specialty-market premium. That focus on affordability sets East Coast Roast apart from some of the Island's more expensive specialty roasters — Comuniello built the company explicitly around making genuinely good, locally roasted single-origin coffee accessible to regular families rather than positioning it as a luxury product, a meaningfully different pitch than roasters chasing competition-grade Cup of Excellence lots at premium prices. It's the kind of value-first identity that comes through directly in how the company describes its own mission rather than something a marketing team layered on after the fact. The transition from a retired police officer's home roasting hobby to an operating Island Park roastery with real retail presence reflects a level of commitment that's easy to undersell — turning a personal obsession with finding the "ultimate" cup of coffee into a business genuinely serving other Long Island families took Comuniello and his family more than a decade of steady, small-batch work, expanding gradually rather than chasing rapid multi-location growth the way some newer Long Island roasters have. A career in the NYPD is an unusual professional background for a specialty coffee roaster, and Comuniello has leaned into that contrast rather than downplaying it — the same methodical, detail-oriented instincts that a decades-long police career requires show up in how the family talks about small-batch roasting, treating consistency and quality control as non-negotiable even while keeping the pricing accessible for regular households rather than positioning the coffee as a premium indulgence. For a Long Island coffee list, East Coast Roast is the essential "retired cop's home-roasting obsession, grown into a real family business" entry — a small-batch Island Park roaster built by Richard Comuniello and his family around the specific goal of keeping genuinely good single-origin coffee affordable for regular Long Island households.
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