Not Every Coffee Bar Is Kicking Out Writers
Can’t prop up your laptop in Manhattan and Brooklyn’s new slick, freelancer-unfriendly “coffee bars”? There’s still hope for you — in Queens. The very jittery and those on deadline can head to Long Island City café Sweetleaf, which today’s Diner Journal reports is primed to triple in size. The joint has the potential to be lazy-writer heaven: There will be a “vinyl room” in the back with a turntable, vintage speakers, and “a lot of rock-and-roll and metal.” (Joan Jett’s on that list, which means we’ll be making the trek.)
There’s also the “laptop lounge,” with fourteen seats ‘specially set aside for freelancers. This could go either way: There are six “bench seats” for those with laptops, and a “community table,” which a co-owner tells us will be an old industrial table with seats attached, that will seat eight. Depending on the popularity of the café and the size of that table, this could entail eight shaky writers on deadline, balancing lattes and elbows a-clanging. One spilled coffee = disaster for a brilliant novel-in-the-making. If any LIC kids check out the space, do report back — but power up beforehand, because Sweetleaf tells us there will be no outlets for another week.