East One Coffee Roasters: An All-Day Café & Roastery Opens In Carroll Gardens
The founders of London’s New Row Coffee and Free State Coffee are bringing East One Coffee Roasters—a roastery, café, and full-service restaurant—to the heart of Carroll Gardens.
Opening Thursday, April 6 at 384 Court Street in the former Casa Rosa space, owners Tom Cummings and Morten Tjelum worked with Blueberry Builders to transform the restaurant into a beautiful, inviting space featuring a stylish mix of industrial and Scandinavian-inspired design, floor-to-ceiling windows, wood, concrete, steel and black countertops made with recycled paper.
Cummings and Tjelum both have backgrounds in the hospitality industry. The Danish Tjelum was the was Managing Director and Financial Director of a five-star hotel chain in Copenhagen for several years. Cummings, who is originally from Massachusetts, opened an American-style restaurant in Copenhagen in 1996, two years after moving to the Denmark.
Later he served as the Global Supply Chain Manager for IKEA Food for 15 years, relocating to Sweden, France, and the UK for his position. The pair opened their first coffee shop, New Row Coffee, in London’s Covent Garden in 2011, followed shortly by New State Coffee in Holborn, located in London’s West End.
“We’re a coffee-branded company and our primary business is very much around coffee,” Cummings told BKLYNER Wednesday morning, “but we’ve been in the hospitality industry for so many years we thought it was a great opportunity, particularly when I found this space, to combine all three [café, restaurant, roastery].”
Visitors enter East One from Court Street, into an attractive, 25-seat Nordic-inspired café serving a variety of specialty coffee drinks, pastries, and snacks, as well as wine, beer, and cocktails during evening hours.
The café will serve lighter to medium coffee roasts as well as espresso drinks brewed using a Slayer Steam machine—an innovative new espresso machine developed to steam milk perfectly. It will be the first machine of its kind in the U.S.
My beautifully-presented flat white was creamy—not too foamy, with a nice, smooth shot of espresso.
A hallway leading to the rear of the eatery takes visitors to an impeccable dining area featuring 75 seats surrounding the glass-encased on-site roastery. The menu offers family-friendly modern comfort food.
The roastery and retail area provide a selection of freshly roasted coffee that customers can buy and brew at home. They currently offer two blends—an espresso blend and a drip blend. Visitors will have the opportunity to watch coffee being roasted in a high-tech Diedrich IR 12 Roaster by James Stahon, East One’s Head of Coffee.
East One will serve breakfast, lunch, dinner, and weekend brunch—simple, contemporary comfort food as well as seasonal and shareable dishes inspired by a variety of cultures created using local, sustainable ingredients by Chef Will Ono who has previously helmed the kitchens at Clocktower, Chez Moi and La Fonda del Sol.
Breakfast will be served from 7am to 4pm and includes updated classics such as Malted Pancakes with berry compote, mascarpone, ginger and infused pure maple syrup as well as the Brooklyn Fry-Up, a take on classic English breakfast—eggs, sausage, bacon, beans, and roasted tomato.
Lunch and dinner options include Cheese and Charcuterie Plates; Pozole Verde featuring pork bone broth, hominy avocado and poblano chile; and a Fleishers Cheeseburger with American cheese, special sauce, and pickles.
East One Coffee Roasters is Cummings and Tjelum’s first stateside outpost. “We contemplated coming to Miami or New York and decided on New York,” Cummings explains. “Brooklyn was very high up on my list of locations, but I didn’t want to be in Williamsburg or Bushwick…there are other neighborhoods that I found more interesting in terms of the need and the environment.”
On the pair’s ultimate decision to make their American debut in Carroll Gardens, Cummings says, “I fell in love with the neighborhood the first time I came here.”
