Koko Lists
Start a new list
Log in
Sign up
← New random battle
Koko Battle
Tap your pick.
Think Coffee
Think Coffee has anchored Greenwich Village since the mid-2000s, built specifically for the neighborhood it sits in — steps from NYU, in a part of Manhattan with more students per block than almost anywhere else in the city, and a menu and seating plan built accordingly: reliable wifi, long tables, and a lot of outlets, the practical infrastructure of a shop meant to be worked in for hours rather than passed through quickly. The company built its identity early around Fair Trade and organic sourcing, a set of commitments that were still a genuine differentiator in New York coffee culture in the mid-2000s rather than the baseline expectation they've since become across the industry. That positioning helped Think Coffee stand out from both corporate chains and more austere, minimalist specialty shops at a moment when the city's coffee scene was still sorting out what "third-wave" was even going to mean. The Greenwich Village flagship has stayed a genuine campus fixture for NYU students specifically, the kind of place where studying for finals and meeting for a first date happen at adjacent tables without either feeling out of place. That dual identity — serious enough coffee to satisfy people who care, casual enough atmosphere to just camp out in for an afternoon — is a harder balance than it sounds, and it's the main reason the original location has stayed busy for the better part of two decades. For anyone treating a New York coffee crawl as a chance to actually sit and work rather than just collect cups, Think Coffee's Greenwich Village original is built exactly for that.
VS
Blue Bottle Coffee (Williamsburg)
Blue Bottle was founded by James Freeman in Oakland in 2002, and the company is widely credited alongside a handful of others as one of the roasters that pushed American coffee culture toward what's now called third-wave — meticulous single-cup brewing and close attention to bean freshness rather than dark-roast defaults built for volume. The company opened its first New York location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2010, extending its West Coast-built reputation into a city with no shortage of its own established coffee culture. That Williamsburg opening functioned as Blue Bottle's real test of whether its slower, more deliberate pour-over approach could hold up against New York's faster pace and denser competition. Blue Bottle was acquired by Nestlé in 2017, a deal that gave the roaster serious capital and distribution reach while its café-level identity stayed largely intact — the New York locations, including a compact counter inside Moynihan Train Hall at Penn Station, still run on the same unhurried pour-over and New Orleans-style iced coffee approach that built the brand's reputation well before the acquisition. That contrast — a nationally scaled, corporate-backed coffee company still executing a slow, single-cup pour-over inside one of the busiest transit hubs in the country — is a genuinely New York kind of tension, and it's part of what makes the Williamsburg original worth the trip: it's the location where Blue Bottle first had to prove its whole approach could work outside the Bay Area.
Next battle
Full comparison
About Think Coffee
About Blue Bottle Coffee (Williamsburg)
Popular Battles
1984 vs. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone
1 votes
Friends vs. Curb Your Enthusiasm
1 votes
Ideogram vs. Sora
1 votes
Navy Pier vs. Bishop Museum
1 votes
Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree vs. Skittles
1 votes
George Carlin vs. Oprah Winfrey
1 votes
