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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
Southdown Coffee
Mark Boccard founded Southdown Coffee in Huntington in 2014, betting on what he's described as an untapped market — a town where, in his own account, "nobody was really doing anything of note" with specialty coffee at the time. His family owned the building the original café now occupies, which gave him a practical foothold to test the idea, and the bet paid off: Southdown has since grown into a genuine multi-location Long Island coffee company rather than staying a single Huntington storefront. The company's roasting philosophy centers on presenting single-origin coffees "with clarity and balance," rotating origins across both espresso and batch brew and calibrating each one specifically for how it's being served rather than applying one roast profile across the whole lineup. That approach earned real outside validation: Boccard picked up expert-level recognition at the 2019 US Coffee Roasters Championship, a genuinely competitive national stage, and Southdown was later named among Food & Wine's Best Coffee Shops in America — a notable distinction for a company that started as one person roasting with a specific idea about, as Boccard put it, giving Huntington something it didn't already have. Southdown has since expanded well beyond that original café into seven locations spanning Huntington, Oyster Bay, Glen Cove, Northport, Port Jefferson, Patchogue, and Point Lookout, along with a dedicated roastery in Glen Cove and a wine-bar partnership through Otherside. That's a meaningfully large footprint for a Long Island-founded roaster, built without losing the single-origin, quality-first identity Boccard established at the start. In 2020, Southdown made a structural choice that's relatively rare in specialty coffee at this scale: the company transitioned to employee ownership, tying the business's success directly to the people actually running the roastery and cafés day to day rather than concentrating ownership in a single founder or outside investors. That shift, combined with a menu that leans on hand-prepared drinks, vegan and gluten-free options, and daily-delivered pastries, has let Southdown scale into a genuine regional presence while keeping the sourcing-forward identity that first got it noticed nationally. Boccard's decision to hand ownership to employees just a year after Southdown's national Food & Wine recognition is notable timing — many roasters at that inflection point sell to a larger coffee conglomerate or take on outside investment to fund faster growth, while Southdown instead spread ownership across the baristas and roasters actually doing the daily work across all seven towns the company now operates in. For a Long Island coffee list, Southdown is the essential "national-caliber roasting, built from a single Huntington storefront" entry — a 2019 U.S. championship-recognized roaster that's grown to seven locations and employee ownership without losing the single-origin, clarity-first coffee program Mark Boccard built the whole company around in 2014.
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