There Are So Many Options for To-Go Coffee These Days. But One Kind Is the Best.

This is One Thing, a column with tips on how to live.

There’s a scene late in The Looming Tower, Hulu’s 2018 miniseries based on Lawrence Wright’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book about al-Qaida and the lead-up to 9/11, that made me absolutely nostalgic for one of my greatest loves in New York City: cheap, burnt-smelling coffee-cart coffee.

In the scene, Jeff Daniels—playing John O’Neill, the FBI counterterrorism expert who became head of security at the World Trade Center after being pushed out of the agency just weeks before 9/11—reports for duty at the twin towers on the morning of the attacks. Before heading into the south tower, he ambles up to a short line in front of a little metal trailer. “How’s it going today, Michael? … Coffee, light and sweet, and a bear claw.”

What I love about this quick moment is what it telegraphed to any New Yorker watching: Even though O’Neill was a guy who loved fancy shoes and extravagant meals, he was also a literal regular Joe, getting cheap coffee from a vat with the rest of the working folks. And he ordered it “light and sweet.” O’Neill was from Atlantic City, but he drank his coffee like a real New Yorker. No “milk and sugar” for him. And it came in that famous blue-and-white cup. I can taste it just thinking about it—thin, too sweet, the color of milky tea.

When I moved to New York in 1997, a small cup was 50 cents. It has crept up over time; the last coffee I got from a cart was $1.50. Yes, I complained about it to my husband because, well, it used to be cheaper! But it’s still a bargain compared to places like the Pret A Manger by the Slate office in Brooklyn, where the cost of a brewed coffee starts at $3.75. (And let’s face it: At that point, I’m ordering a latte.) Starbucks drinks are reasonably priced only when there’s a 50-percent-off deal happening in the app, and the Wall Street Journal recently reported that they’re scaling back on doing that. Plus, ordering from the coffee-cart guy—and it is nearly always a guy—makes me feel like a real New Yorker. (Do I still have impostor syndrome, 27 years after moving here? I do. As my daughter reminds me, the only real New Yorkers are born here.)

There’s just one problem: Cheap coffee carts are increasingly hard to come by. The ubiquity of slick corporate offerings like Blank Street and smaller artisanal shops has pushed out the little guy in the shiny wagon. Thankfully, I know where a good one is close to my office, and if I take a certain subway I can hit it before heading in. Still, in a pinch, I’ll patronize one of those next-gen carts that have popped up all over. I actually had a great coffee from a spacious cart in the parking lot of my daughter’s sleepaway camp upstate this summer. The trouble was, I had to ask for “milk and sugar,” and it cost me four bucks.