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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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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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