From Youngstown, Ohio to Brooklyn, with a stop in DC, Justin Chearno was on the music scene in DC in the early ‘90s with his band Pitchblende and later in NY with Turing Machine . He eventually settled in Brooklyn and was at the forefront of natural wine at retailer Uva and natty wine distributor Zev Rovine Selections.
Mister Paradise s Party Lobster / Photo courtesy Mister Paradise
Orlando McCray is a White Claw man. “Truly is trash,” says the head bartender at Nightmoves, a sister bar to natural wine destination The Four Horsemen in Brooklyn, New York. “There are faux artisanal brands I have given a chance, but they’re not good.”
In 2020, “when things got real dark,” says McCray, the appeal of easy-drinking, no-thinking hard seltzers was even stronger for him and his hospitality comrades-in-arms.
“What’s funny is that I turned our wine director, Justin Chearno, onto hard seltzer as well, and as soon as I turned a natural wine person, I knew I was onto something,” he says.
The Felix Roasting Co. coffee shop and bar in New York City’s SoHo neighborhood opened this year. Images courtesy of Felix Roasting Co.
While the eastern portion of the United States has some drastic cultural differences from the coastline to Appalachia, or the bustling north to the sweltering south the common love of coffee runs as deep as the waters of the North Atlantic.
Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has been too much to bear for an untold number of cafes this year, when already slim margins were driven to their limits, and temporary closures too often became permanent ones. Yet some entrepreneurs brazenly defied that trend in 2020, opening their first ever shops or pushing forward with pre-existing expansion plans with hope for a brighter tomorrow.