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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.
VS
Flux Coffee
Flux Coffee didn't start as a café at all — it started in 2010 in Berkeley, California, as a cold brew company built around an innovative cold brew method that founder Arsalan Pourmand distributed via bottles and kegs across the Bay Area rather than through a storefront. That's a genuinely unusual origin for a business that's since become a fixture of the Long Island coffee scene: most local roasters start with a café and add packaged product later, while Flux started as a packaged cold brew brand and only later became a place you could sit down. Pourmand eventually moved back east, and in 2017 he opened Flux's first brick-and-mortar café and roastery on Main Street in Farmingdale — a deliberate shift from a West Coast cold brew operation into a full Long Island café and roasting business. That East Coast pivot gives Flux a distinct identity among Farmingdale-area roasters: the cold brew technique that built the company in California remains a core part of the menu, alongside a full hot espresso and drip program developed after the move. The café itself functions as both a working roastery and a retail bar, letting customers watch and buy beans roasted on-site rather than sourcing green coffee elsewhere and shipping it out. Flux sells pre-bagged grounds and whole beans to go alongside its brewed drinks, giving regulars a way to take the same coffee home that they're drinking in the café — a straightforward but not universal offering among smaller Long Island roasters, several of which sell only prepared drinks on-site. The company's full name, Flux Coffee, still nods to its cold-brew-first identity even as the Farmingdale café has broadened into a complete specialty coffee operation — Daily Coffee News covered the brand's evolution specifically under the headline description of Flux flowing "from West to East, Cold to Hot," a framing that captures the company's actual business history more precisely than most café origin stories manage. That West Coast-to-Long Island arc, combined with Pourmand's specific technical background in cold brew extraction, gives Flux a genuinely different foundation than the classic "barista opens a neighborhood café" story most other Long Island coffee shops tell. For a Long Island coffee list, Flux Coffee is the essential "cold brew company that became a full café" entry — a Berkeley-born cold brew business that Arsalan Pourmand relocated and rebuilt into a working Farmingdale roastery and bar, carrying its bottled-and-kegged origins into a genuine hot-and-cold specialty coffee program.
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