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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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Georgio's Coffee Roasters
Georgio's Coffee Roasters opened its first café in Huntington in 2006, founded by Georgio and his wife, before consolidating its roastery and retail bar under a single Farmingdale roof in 2011 — a move that let the company control roasting and retail from one location rather than splitting operations across towns. Nearly two decades later, that Farmingdale bar remains the company's home base and its only standalone location outside a newer Stony Brook café that opened in 2025, marking just the second retail cafe in the company's twenty-year history. The roasting itself runs on a 30-year-old Probat L12, the same style of workhorse roasting machine used by serious specialty roasters nationally, and Georgio's team has traveled to farms in at least seven coffee-producing countries to source beans directly rather than buying exclusively through importers. The company's bean lineup has included coffees from more than 20 Cup of Excellence competition winners — a meaningful marker of quality, since Cup of Excellence is one of the more rigorous, internationally judged coffee competitions producing countries participate in, and sourcing from that many winning lots reflects a genuinely serious buying program rather than a marketing claim. Daily Coffee News, a trade publication covering the specialty coffee industry nationally, featured Georgio's specifically as a "longtime Long Island roaster" upon the 2025 Stony Brook opening — language that reflects how the company is regarded within the industry itself, not just by local customers. That two-decade span between the first Huntington café and the second standalone location outside Farmingdale is a notably slow, deliberate growth pace compared to newer Long Island roasters that have opened multiple locations within just a few years of founding. As Georgio and his wife work toward retirement, more of the day-to-day operation has shifted to longtime team members, including a manager named Cummins — a transition the company has approached gradually rather than as an abrupt ownership handoff, aiming to keep the same quality commitment in place through the changeover. That slow, careful approach to both growth and succession mirrors the deliberateness of the roasting program itself. Traveling directly to farms in seven producing countries, rather than relying solely on importers and brokers, is a meaningfully larger commitment of time and money than most small regional roasters make, and it's the kind of investment that only pays off if the buying relationships built on those trips actually translate into the kind of Cup of Excellence-caliber lots Georgio's has consistently featured on its menu over the past two decades. For a Long Island coffee list, Georgio's Coffee Roasters is the essential "twenty years, one serious roasting program" entry — a Farmingdale roastery running a 30-year-old Probat L12 and sourcing from more than 20 Cup of Excellence winners, expanding at a pace measured in decades rather than years since its 2006 Huntington founding.
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