Metropolis Coffee Company

1039 W Granville Ave, Chicago, IL

Last updated 8/27/2026

Metropolis Coffee Company was founded in 2003 as a father-and-son-owned roastery and café, built in Chicago's Edgewater neighborhood on the city's North Side. The flagship café on Granville Avenue has stayed the company's home base even as the business has scaled well beyond a single neighborhood coffee shop into a serious wholesale coffee operation. That wholesale side is genuinely substantial: Metropolis supplies coffee to hundreds of cafés and restaurants across the U.S., Canada, and South Korea, roasting out of a dedicated Roasterie facility on North Rockwell Street in addition to the original Edgewater café. That's an unusually wide footprint for a roaster that most Chicago coffee drinkers still primarily associate with one specific neighborhood storefront. The Edgewater café itself has stayed a genuine neighborhood fixture rather than becoming purely a wholesale-focused operation — friendly, unpretentious service and a straightforward specialty-coffee menu, the kind of place that built its reputation on being a good local café first and let the wholesale business grow around that reputation rather than the other way around. The father-son ownership structure is worth noting specifically because it's rare at Metropolis's current scale — most roasters supplying restaurants across three countries have gone through private equity or corporate acquisition by that point, while Metropolis has kept the same family at the center of the business since 2003. That continuity shows up in small ways at the original café: consistent staff, a menu that's evolved gradually rather than through sudden rebranding, and a genuine sense that the Granville Avenue location is still the actual center of the business rather than a legacy storefront kept open for nostalgia. Metropolis was founded by a father-son pair, Jeff and Tony Dreyfuss, whose paths into coffee were almost accidental: Jeff, then a linguistics professor in Seattle, fell into an informal roasting apprenticeship after pestering his local café with questions, while Tony discovered coffee culture driving a cab through late nights during college. The two bought a vintage roasting machine at a trade show with no real business plan for it, and built Metropolis around that impulse purchase starting in December 2003. The company has since outgrown its original Edgewater equipment entirely, moving wholesale roasting operations into an 18,000-square-foot facility in Avondale, even as the Granville Avenue café has stayed the storefront most identified with the family name — a genuine split between where Metropolis roasts today and where it started. For a Chicago coffee list, Metropolis is the essential "neighborhood café that quietly became a serious wholesale roaster" entry — a father-and-son Edgewater coffee shop that now supplies restaurants across three countries, without ever losing the identity of the original Granville Avenue storefront that started it all in 2003.

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