How to Savor: Exploring America's Top 5 Coffeehouses

I helped to open a Starbucks while in my early twenties, and although I haven’t crossed the threshold of any one of those many Moby Dick-inspired namesakes in years, I’ll always concede that the company did many things well. Those few weeks of training transformed us into something approaching coffee evangelists. The irony wasn’t lost on me then. And it echoes louder now: they trained us to develop our coffee palate with such precision that we could discern the subtleties between a Guatemalan Antigua and a Costa Rican Tarrazú, and yet if you’ve ever tasted their coffee with an experienced palate, well, it tastes like desperation brewed at too high a temperature. Perhaps that’s exactly why it’s now possible to find a transcendent cup of coffee in nearly any corner of America—except, of course, at Starbucks. Their displaced baristas scattered like seeds across the country, carrying with them the knowledge of what coffee could be, even if they could never quite achieve it within those green-walled confines.

I have wandered through several incredible places within these States, and somewhere along the way, I developed a peculiar cartography: I began to measure cities not by their skylines or their museums, but by the coffee houses nestled in their neighborhoods. There’s something about a coffeehouse that serves as a town's most honest mirror. It’s where introverts come to watch extroverts perform the daily theater of connection, where writers scribble furiously in margins, where the lonely come to be alone together, and where the gregarious hold court at communal tables. A coffeehouse is the heartbeat of a place, not the tourist attractions or the chamber of commerce highlights, but the authentic pulse of a community’s soul.

The five coffeehouses that have most profoundly shaped my understanding of place, of coffee, and perhaps of myself reveal themselves like chapters in a book I’m still writing.

 

5. Black Rifle Coffee Company; Boerne, Texas

Black Rifle Coffee Co., which was founded in Salt Lake City in 2014, has chosen Boerne as its first Texas brick-and-mortar location. Somewhere in those Utah mountains, Evan Hafer, one of the company’s veteran founders, was roasting beans in his garage, probably never imagining that his coffee would eventually anchor itself in the heart of the Texas Hill Country, in a town where my own story began.

I grew up in Boerne, fled it in 2006 like so many young people flee their origins, only to return a decade later with the strange recognition that sometimes we have to leave a place to understand why we belonged there. When BRCC opened its doors in 2019, there was already Electric Coffee holding down the local coffee fort. Clif, the owner of Electric Coffee, had created something intimate and familiar, the kind of place where the barista knew not just your order but the cadence of your footsteps as you approached the counter. But when Black Rifle arrived with its bold, almost aggressive coffee profile and its unabashed patriotism, something shifted in the town’s coffee ecosystem. Electric Coffee closed not long after, whether from competition or coincidence, I’ll never know, but the timing felt like a small tragedy.

BRCC’s coffee possesses an intensity that borders on confrontational. The first sip I took felt like a challenge, as if the beans themselves were demanding I pay attention. This wasn’t coffee for passive consumption; it was coffee that required you to be present, to acknowledge its presence in your mouth, your throat, your chest. The community tables became my inadvertent office. Though productivity invariably suffered when familiar faces began to recognize my daily pilgrimage. There’s something both comforting and claustrophobic about becoming a regular in a small-town coffee shop. You’re simultaneously embraced and watched, known and scrutinized.

Now, living on the opposite coast, I wear my BRCC t-shirt like a talisman, and I’m continually amazed by the responses it generates. Strangers approach me to declare it “the best coffee in the world,” as if we’re sharing membership in some secret society. There’s something almost mystical about being present at a coffee company’s origins, about witnessing its transformation from garage experiment to national phenomenon. I was there when Black Rifle was still discovering itself, still figuring out its voice, and there’s a peculiar intimacy in that kind of witness.

 

4. Sunset Coffee; Sandy, Utah

Memory can be unreliable about origins, but I suspect I discovered Sunset Coffee through one of my Barnes & Noble colleagues and friends in Murray, Utah, someone who recognized the particular restlessness of a coffee shop devotee and pointed me toward Sandy’s northeastern residential maze. Sunset sits in a landscape that feels accidentally discovered, tucked away in a neighborhood where you’d never venture unless someone gave you specific directions and probably drew you a map.

Sandy rests about twenty minutes south of downtown Salt Lake City, and Sunset Coffee occupies that strange middle distance, too far from the city center to be convenient, too integrated into suburban sprawl to feel remote. But sometimes the best discoveries happen in these in-between spaces, in these unlikely locations where someone decided to plant something beautiful despite the odds.

The coffee at Sunset deserves recognition on its own merits, but what I remember most vividly, even after fifteen years, are their Dragon Chai and Tiger Chai, concoctions that existed in some perfect alchemy of spice, warmth, and possibility. Behind only New Mexico’s Annapurnas Chai, Sunset Coffee created the most transcendent chai I’ve ever experienced. The kind that makes you understand why ancient cultures built entire ceremonies around the sharing of spiced beverages.

Living in Salt Lake City, I developed a peculiar physical relationship with the place, a singing pressure behind my eyes and in my ears that became a constant companion. When I moved to New York, the pressure dissipated, and I began to understand that some bodies aren’t meant for certain altitudes, certain atmospheres. I’ve returned to Salt Lake twice since then, and each time the pressure returns like a reminder of why I left. But it’s also why Sunset Coffee holds such a powerful place in my memory. It was a refuge within a landscape that my body found inhospitable.

I spent countless hours there, often stretching well past midnight, engaged in those rambling conversations that can only happen when coffee has become an excuse for deeper connection. Neil, the owner, possessed the rare gift of being genuinely interested in ideas, religion, politics, human nature, and the kind of subjects that reveal themselves only in the small hours when the coffee pot grows cold and inhibitions lower. Those conversations exist now as a collection of moments I carry with me, proof that sometimes the most meaningful connections happen in the most unexpected places.

From the rear patio, the valley spreads below like a meditation on space and possibility, particularly around sunset when the light transforms the landscape into something approaching the sublime. It’s a view that makes you understand why people choose to live in difficult places. Sometimes beauty is worth the discomfort.

 

3. Tru North; Livingston, Montana

The first time I walked into Tru North, I was working in Bozeman and spending minimal time in Livingston, operating under the assumption that twenty miles west held everything worth experiencing. One glance around Tru North’s interior, the electric fireplaces, the thoughtfully arranged nooks, the bay window seating that invited lingering, and I realized I might have misjudged not just the coffeehouse, but the entire town surrounding it. Sometimes a single place can shift your understanding of a town and can make you question all your previous assumptions about what’s worth your attention.

James, the owner, approaches coffee with the intensity of a scientist and the creativity of an artist. This is not a place where coffee happens accidentally; every cup represents a series of deliberate choices, careful calibrations, and a commitment to the idea that coffee can be both sustenance and art. Tru North serves some of the most inventive food I’ve encountered in a coffee shop, creations that shouldn’t work but somehow achieve a perfect harmony of flavors and textures.

The signature drink, The Cloud, emerged from one of those middle-of-the-night inspirations that creative people understand. James woke with the idea fully formed, raced his motorcycle through winter darkness to the coffeehouse, and brought something entirely new into existence. There’s something beautiful about that kind of urgency, that willingness to chase an idea wherever it leads, even if it means racing through frozen streets at dawn.

My preferred spot is atop the platform by the bay window, a vantage point that offers both comfort and a bit of theater. Livingston possesses the kind of small-town magnetism that attracts interesting people, passing through—writers, actors, musicians, and wanderers. One afternoon, I glanced up from my book to discover Michael Keaton sitting nearby. And when our eyes met as he prepared to leave, he offered the kind of genuine wave that suggested he understood the particular pleasure of being anonymous in a good coffee shop.

Tru North shares certain characteristics with The Villa in Idaho Falls; both possess that ineffable quality that makes you want to return, and both create space for contemplation and connection. But Tru North holds a unique distinction in my coffeehouse experience: it’s the only place I’ve made a habit of visiting without bringing work. I sit there and expect nothing from myself except presence, except the simple pleasure of being in a space that understands the value of slowing down.

 

2. MUD Coffee; New York City, New York

There’s a small coffeehouse in Boerne, Texas, called The Daily Grind that taught me my first lessons about coffee shop romance. The coffee was forgettable, the atmosphere sparse. It was built into an alley between two antique shops, creating an accidental intimacy that proved more important than perfect espresso or comfortable seating. The Daily Grind showed me that sometimes location and atmosphere can transform even mediocre coffee into something approaching magic.

MUD Coffee—sometimes inexplicably called MudSpot—completed The Daily Grind’s education. I discovered MUD during one of those aimless Village wanderings, the kind of purposeless urban exploration that can only happen when you have time, curiosity, and no particular destination in mind. The storefront possessed an understated coolness that made it impossible to pass without investigating, and a coffee shop in the Village demanded attention.

The front room challenged claustrophobia, a narrow space packed with people whose backs created a human wall between the entrance and the counter. I squeezed through, ordered my coffee, and began exploring the labyrinthine interior, following hallways and passing through doorframes until I discovered an unexpected back room illuminated by a skylight that dominated nearly the entire ceiling. The tables were arranged with deliberate imperfection along the walls, bench seating that suggested permanence rather than quick turnover.

I found a single open seat at a table and settled in to absorb the experience, drinking coffee under a skylight in a coffeehouse in the Village in New York City. These moments require conscious acknowledgment; they demand that you pause and recognize the accumulation of circumstances that led to this particular configuration of light, liquid, and urban possibility.

I sat there reading David Foster Wallace, trying to focus on the complexity of his sentences, but finding my attention drawn repeatedly to a woman sitting across the room. There’s something about coffeehouses that heightens awareness, that makes you more susceptible to the poetry of unexpected attraction. I kept redirecting my focus to the book, reminding myself that I had come there to read, to enjoy the coffee, to experience this discovery. And she likely had too.

MUD possessed a cool, somewhat exclusive atmosphere, not unwelcoming, but discerning. I didn’t live particularly close, and despite my affection for the Village, I didn’t spend as much time there as I should have. But whenever I found myself in those narrow streets, I inevitably made my way back to MUD, sometimes claiming the coveted window seating, sometimes carrying my coffee to Washington Square Park to sit by the fountain and listen to buskers transform the urban soundscape into something approaching a soundtrack.

Living in New York rarely offers more romantic experiences than sitting in Washington Square Park, an exceptional coffee in my hands, and watching the city perform its daily theater of ambition and possibility.

 

1. Iconik Coffee Roasters; Santa Fe, New Mexico

Someone dragged me to Iconik Coffee on a late morning after I had already been living in Santa Fe for nearly a year, proof that sometimes we can inhabit a place without truly discovering it. We were driving farther south on Cerrillos than I typically preferred. South of the Pantry, which served as my personal boundary marker for “too far south” and into an area of warehouses and multi-use office buildings that felt like the kind of industrial nowhere I actively avoided.

Then, suddenly, like the sun emerging from behind heavy clouds, there appeared this large, warehouse-esque building with a small garden scattered with patio chairs and tables, populated by people who seemed to understand something I was about to learn. We followed the road behind the building and to the right. We found a parking space only because someone was leaving, and we walked through the back doors into Iconik Coffee Roasters.

Immediately to our right stood the largest drum roaster I had ever seen outside of a coffee production facility. I assumed it was decorative, an impressive prop designed to create atmosphere. The idea that they would actually use such a substantial piece of equipment seemed almost absurd; this was just aesthetic theater.

In March of 2016, Iconik Coffee Roasters partnered with Collected Works Bookstore to bring specialty coffee to downtown Santa Fe! But this original location on Lena Street represented something more profound than a typical coffee shop expansion. This was a place where coffee was treated as craft, an art, and as something deserving of patience and attention.

We waited in line for what felt like an extended meditation on anticipation, watching baristas approach each order with the kind of careful attention typically reserved for more obviously artistic pursuits. This wasn’t Starbucks’ efficiency; this was coffee as it was meant to be prepared, slowly, deliberately, with respect for the beans, the process, and the person who would eventually receive the finished product.

Standing in line, nearing the counter, I heard a sudden jolt behind me, the sound of machinery stirring. Followed by a consistent rumble that grew increasingly prominent. Within minutes, the aroma of coffee filled the room. The aroma was tentative at first, then bold and encompassing. The expensive prop behind us wasn’t decorative at all. The owner was roasting beans in real time, creating the coffee we would drink from the raw materials of cherry, heat, and time.

I ordered an Ethiopian pour-over, which would become my standard choice; though I eventually worked my way through their entire menu, like a student studying a curriculum. We carried our coffee to the garden out front, where I sat on an uncomfortable metal chair and took my first sip.

That first taste transcended mere caffeination; it was closer to enlightenment: a reminder of what coffee could be when treated with the respect it deserved. My sinuses cleared, my vision sharpened, and I felt a kind of awakening that had nothing to do with caffeine and everything to do with recognizing perfection. This was coffee that demanded attention, that rewarded patience, that justified the ritual of preparation and consumption.

Iconik Coffee represents the only coffee I have ever ordered online, the only beans I trust enough to ship across the country, and the only coffee that maintains its integrity regardless of distance or time. They’re passionate about their coffee, how they brew, why they brew, and everything in between.

The idea that coffeehouses serve their communities in ways that extend far beyond caffeine provision strikes me as profound. I maintain a complicated relationship with coffee. Age has made me more sensitive to its effects, and an eight-ounce cup now represents pretty much all my body can handle. When I spend time in a coffeehouse, the experience transcends the beverage itself. We create characters of ourselves in these spaces, versions that exist outside our daily routines, and we inhabit fantasies of who we might be if we were the kind of people who spent afternoons in coffee shops reading important books or writing in journals or engaging in meaningful conversations with strangers.

It fascinates me that we continue to choose this particular setting for these transformations. The coffeehouse remains our preferred stage for becoming slightly different versions of ourselves, for accessing possibilities that feel temporarily within reach.

Whether you find yourself in any of these particular places or not, whether you’re bored enough to drive cross-country to challenge my understanding of the perfect coffeehouse, I encourage you to make destinations of these five establishments. Experience them, measure them against your own standards, and share your discoveries with me. Coffee, after all, is most meaningful when it becomes part of a conversation that extends beyond the cup itself.