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Famous Restaurant where Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Bartended Closes Due to Rising Minimum Wage
Restaurant closures in New York are about as common as openings. They happen on such a frequent basis that only the long-gone favorite haunts of the Manhattan elite—like the original Four Seasons, Le Cirque, Elaine’s, even Gino’s—receive proper obituaries.
The Coffee Shop, in New York's Union Square, was not in that league. Coffee Shop isn’t even Union Square Cafe, Danny Meyer's groundbreaking restaurant that was so essential to the city that losing its spot on the square it made famous wasn’t enough to close it for good.
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The place was run by former Wilhelmina models and counted Elle Macpherson, Kevin Bacon and Isaac Mizrahi, among many other bold-faced names, as regulars in its earliest days. Laverne Cox waited tables there for 10 years, as did Maya Rudolph and superstar House candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. It was also a favorite for Carrie Bradshaw on Sex and the City, and most of the retrospectives you’ll read include mention of these and other celebrity diners.
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For nearly 30 years, serving those many occasions has added up to enormous success. According to Restaurant Business magazine’s 2017 ranking of the 100 highest-grossing independent restaurants in the U.S., Coffee Shop served 314,000 meals and pulled in an estimated $14.3 million in sales, good enough to land in the 79th spot on the list. Coffee Shop stands out as one of few non-steakhouses (there are 24, mostly in New York and Las Vegas) or bottle-service meccas (the Tao Group has five on the list) to crack the top 100, and to do so consistently for nearly two decades.
And yet, even this high level of sales wasn’t enough to inoculate the business from the rising cost of rent and wages in New York. Coffee Shop co-owner and president Charlies Milite told Forbes that rent had become “unusually high,” accounting for close to 27% of the restaurant’s gross revenues. Add in the scheduled $2-per-hour minimum wage hike set to take place on December 31—an increase that, across Coffee Shop’s 150 employees and multiple dayparts of service, would have added $46,000 to the monthly payroll—made it impossible to break even by cutting costs elsewhere.
“It’s a wakeup call for our industry in general,” Milite said. “When a restaurant is one of the top-ranked restaurants in America, sales-wise, and can no longer afford to operate, you have to look at that and say there’s a shifting paradigm in the business.”
