What: Coffee, pastries, cakes, limited kitchen menu.
Where: 72 East 1st St, between 1st & 2nd Ave, downtown Manhattan.
How Much? Coffee and breakfast $12ish
Overall: 9 out of 10
Bluebird was an early addition to my NYC holiday hit list after a quick search for the best coffee local to our mission base in the East Village. It ranked high, and deservedly so. The coffee was perfect, the staff jovial and on my visit impeccably turned out. Looking good, ladies.
It’s a cute setting, with wooden floors, artsy lighting and stool & bench seating. By cute, I do actually mean small. Like, eight seats or you’re outside small. And if you aren’t friendly with those other seven people when you sit down you will be by the time you leave.
So it is close quarters, but you can get everything to go and thus relocate to pastures with more elbow room like a small porch area at the front or the park on the other side of the road. Maybe not the park unless you have kids with you or that’s just weird.
But cosy as we were, we still ordered breakfast and if the coffee was good then the food was a revelation.
Simple, tasty and flawlessly executed. The older male sibling went for baked oatmeal- a solid construction of oats, nuts, dried fruit and spices packed into a tempting brick of hot slow-carby goodness. Served with freshly steamed milk (whole please, we’re English) and an elegantly sliced nana. Beautiful. Our R&D team are putting all their efforts into recreating this one at home.
I went for the avocado toast- a single slice of rye bread topped with a glorious dollop of avocado that I can most closely describe as heftily whipped- a deceptively substantial guacamole cloud if you will. Top that with feta crumbles, a few slithers of pickled red onion and a shake of chilli flakes. The edible equivalent of getting chatted up by a sexy Latino stranger who sidestepped your hotter frenemy to get to you. Most smugly satisfying indeed.
Their pastry cabinet also looked worth investigating, in particular the pound cake slices which I should have picked up to go. Sadly our planned return visit was vetoed by too much booze crab steak pie dinner on Saturday night.
My only complaint is the size, yeah it creates a buzz to always have a queue but eating at a shelf by the door doesn’t do much for the digestion.
A great stop, and a great start for us that day.
Food. Boom. 