“We want our space to feel like your friend’s living room,” Tobly McSmith told me about his decision to open a day and night coffee shop on the edge of Bushwick and Bed-Stuy called High & Dry. The name didn’t come easy. “We spent weeks trying to find the name that would signify our goal — our caffeine drinks get you lifted, or ‘high,’ and we’re a no-alcohol space, hence the ‘dry,’” he says. “It was just a happenstance that Radiohead wrote a song years ago about our coffee bar.”
Located near the bustling intersection of Myrtle Avenue and Broadway, McSmith’s High & Dry functions both as a cafe and a bar that sells a handful of alcohol-free drinks, like “NY Egg Creams,” “Butterfly Pea Lemonade,” and their take on a “Laura Palmer,” which is both coffee and lemonade. Cheaper than cocktails, these drinks range from $6.50 to $8. They also sell the kinds of espresso and matcha drinks you can find at a cafe anywhere, but offered all night long, as well as a growing collection of unique teas, like a green tea with lemon balm and a citrus chamomile with rooibos.
He’s running it with Garret Peterson, Breandan Carroll, and Daniel Stettner, a group that came together running several non-alcoholic bars and cafes around town, like Misfit and Ka-va, a Williamsburg kava bar that has since shuttered.
“We all struggled to find places where we could enjoy ourselves without alcohol,” says McSmith.
Their previous experiences are as varied as their backgrounds. Peterson used to work as a paramedic in Coney Island for over 5 years. Stettner works as a freelance graphic designer, with experience handling rebranding efforts for companies like Burger King and Uber. He now runs branding and marketing for High & Dry. McSmith has written a collection of young adult novels for HarperCollins, like a “coming-of-age teen love story” titled Stay Gold and Act Cool, the latter named a “Bank Street Children’s Best Books of the Year.” Carroll, on the other hand, says he managed several non-alcoholic spots in Florida before moving back to New York, where he grew up.
“We envision High & Dry as a local haven – open all day and night – where the city’s chaos fades away and everyone feels at home,” says McSmith. They had been searching for over a year to find a place for this, before landing on a craft beer bar called St. Elias, which closed in December 2023.
Inspired as much by bars as by the coffee shops of early 2000s like Williamsburg’s the Verb, itself gentrified out of there by rising rents in 2014, McSmith says that their cafe wants to replicate their character and serve as what he calls a “third space” for the community. They’ll start serving food there next month.
“We hope to bring in granola and other snacks sourced locally. Eventually, we want to serve breakfast tacos and sandwiches,” says McSmith.
The design reflects this vision with a vintage espresso machine and eclectic decor. The group has outfitted the space with repurposed furniture and, currently, the artwork drawn from each of their homes, an amalgamation of their personalities.
High & Dry is located at 899 Broadway, open daily from 12pm to 12am. Keep updated on their hours via their Instagram.
Photos taken by Seth Gilgus for Bushwick Daily.
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