When describing his new business, Cafe Ornithology, jazz club impresario Mitchell Borden has no shortage of similes. “It’s like the butterfly and the chrysalis, or a bird hatching from an egg,” says Borden. “The place was horrible before, and now it looks like this.”
The cafe took flight last month, on Nov. 17, when it opened its doors to the public. Neighboring the popular Bushwick jazz club of the same name (a nod to Charlie “Bird” Parker) the cafe is open from ten in the morning and closes ‘round midnight. Offering mediterranean-inspired fare for lunch and dinner, the menu is entirely vegan, part of the cafe’s sustainability-minded approach. After 6:30pm, there’s a five dollar cover, and dinner tables are available for reservation for ten. There’s generally live jazz going, of course, both day and night.
“If I was a musician, I could get an afternoon jam in, and then come back late at night and jam again,” says Borden, who owns Ornithology with his wife, the jazz percussionist and singer Rie Yamaguchi-Borden. “To be playing that much is crazy. Maybe it’s never been done before.”
The pair had their eyes on the property when its previous tenant, the vegan cafe Brooklyn Whiskers, closed in September. Borden says the landlord had trouble finding someone else to lease the space and quickly approached him about taking over. “We received the key to come into this place on Sept. 17,” says Yamaguchi-Borden. “So we basically demolished, renovated and opened within two months.”
That turnaround was no small feat: he says the erstwhile cafe was in desperate need of repairs.
“It was horrible before,” says Borden. “It took us a month just to clean the dirt.” They financed the business with a $150,000 loan deal from the company Squarespace, in exchange for a share of the cafe’s food and beverage sales.
Those efforts have so far paid off. In contrast to the club’s darker environs, the cafe is bright with high ceilings; rugs cover the floor and hang from the beige-colored walls. The cafe boasts a library of nearly 600 jazz records—inherited from a bassist friend who passed away—ensuring a steady stream of tunes. In the rear of the cafe, a wall of used books are sold by a pair of baristas who also work, elsewhere, at the local book store, Molasses. The renovation is still something of a work-in-progress. Graffiti covers the windows and the easy-to-miss signage is scrawled on the mailbox in white paint. It gives the place a bit of Bushwick-grunge charm.
At just two dollars, a cup of coffee is bodega-cheap, while the most expensive item on the menu is the vegetable stew, which goes for $16.
Adam Frumkin, a jazz saxophonist and the cafe’s head chef, says that he designed the plant-based menu with some idea of keeping prices affordable.
“Since we opened here, I keep seeing clients come back,” Frumkin says. “This is what it’s about. We’re not here for somebody to come just once.”
The cafe is far from Borden’s first rodeo: he’s run several successful jazz clubs, including Smalls in Greenwich Village, which he opened in 1994. Although he left Smalls years ago, Borden emerged from retirement amid the pandemic when he and Yamaguchi-Borden started the Gotham Yardbird Sanctuary, a non-profit that provided financial assistance to jazz musicians. The Gotham project eventually led the couple to open Ornithology, in 2021.
“We don’t give a shit about Alan Greenspan and whether the market is doing good,” Borden says, adding that “the reason why we can lower prices is because we have music.”
On a recent Sunday, the club was packed next door, but business was slow at the cafe, which is still waiting for a liquor license. This doesn’t stop some from checking out the instruments. After playing a holiday set at the club, trumpist Joe Magnarelli takes to improvising on the cafe’s piano.
“The bass growls like a tiger,” says Borden, leaning over the Steinway to show off its lower register. When Magnarelli heads out for the night, a few more musicians trickle in. They begin improvising in the mostly-empty cafe, and Borden pulls out the bass and joins the jam.
“You’re going to come and hear music,” says Borden, with the prophetic confidence of someone who’s opened more than one storied jazz club in his time.
Cafe Ornithology is located at 1037 Broadway and is open from 10 a.m. to 12 p.m. Keep up with their hours on Instagram.
Images provided by Cafe Ornithology.
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