Dennis Tang

@tangaciousD

Supercrown Coffee Roasters opened in Bushwick in 2016 with bona fide awesome brew. Gorilla Coffee founder Darleen Scherer wanted to take on the mass-artisan Stumptowns and Blue Bottles of the world with her own Brooklyn upstart, serving some clever coffee-lemonades and espresso-tonics along the way.

But I didn’t know any of that yet. I was just walking the streets near my apartment, saw a pretty new place, and stepped in. I was a “writer” —meaning a freshly laid-off magazine editor who’d just started grad school. I’d recently been priced out of Williamsburg, like many other L train migrants, and was still taking the train westward to freelance out of my old haunts, not having found the perfect local spot. I was personally in flux, picky about the places where I could write, and looking for somewhere to settle down for good.

Supercrown looked promising enough. The doors opened to a view of the gorgeous 1952 German Probat roaster in a pink-painted back room. The space was calming. The coffee was great. I went again and again, worked, wrote, and hung out for hours and hours, and it was wonderful. Stabilizing.