The Left Hook Coffee: Going the Distance
In the heart of North Carolina’s well-lauded Research Triangle, home to: the capital, several of our most prestigious universities, no shortage of major employers, and, among other things, a plentiful supply of coffee shops, the Left Hook Coffee rolls with the punches.
The Counter
I found it by chance and by proximity, the shop being walkable from my first apartment in Raleigh. For much of its time, the Left Hook has been a coffee counter within a local bar. The only indication that you’ve arrived is a hand-painted sign out front pointing to a business with a different logo on the door.
Inside, there’s not much more than a bar and some shared seating within the larger restaurant. No major sign or banner on the walls – everything that is the Left Hook’s is everything that is impermanent. And yet, every day the place is filled with people. Filled with the soft din of laughter and conversations, with people bent over laptops and posted up in the comfier seats with books. Small groups gather around two stools that are pushed to the side so they don’t crowd the register. They lean against the bar, bending in and out of conversation with the baristas as orders come through, making plans for the afternoon.
There are also the normal coffee shop sounds (whirring grinder doling portioned espresso, screaming milk steamer, the tapping of the tamp for the next shot) and a cabinet with bagged whole beans, too. But Raleigh is filled with coffee shops that have these things and yet few ever match the shared-living-room feeling the Left Hook manages every day.
There’s (ostensibly) a lot of thought that goes into modern business practices. Everywhere you look, we’re surrounded by over-marketed slogans, turnkey layouts, scalable products and so on until every new chain feels like the last and erases what makes each place unique. Against this, the Left Hook leads with the chin.
The image on their coffee bags is the owner’s grandfather. “He’s taking the punch,” she says, working through a set of orders lined up along the bar. “But he was always good at that.” It seems Kristin follows his lead.
Left Hook started small. Kristin roasted on a second-hand machine between shifts at her day job and sold her coffee in markets.
“Back then it was just the cold brew,” one of the many regulars says, a cup of the same in hand. “Now it’s called the Original.”
In Your Corner
The sign outside was painted by a local artist and you can see his homemade clothing for sale inside. There’s poetry on the wall from the owner of a local bike shop and posters behind it from a graphic designer who works for the local hospital network but usually does this from his designated seat at the bar, just beside the wall of dog portraits who are regulars here at least as much as their owners.
All of this together creates something different, something inherently antithetical to the commercial – something so tightly wrapped by the thread of community that, were it relocated to a new city, it might be laid bare.
Maybe this difference is why, when the Left Hook set up a fundraiser block party to support opening their own location, the community carried it the distance.
Maybe that’s why the band who meets at the shop through the week played for the block party, or the graphic designer scheduled and coordinated volunteers for weeks leading up to the event, or why the tattoo artist who brings his dog by to get a treat and an americano had a line out the door for flash. Maybe it’s why dozens of regulars brought in hundreds of people to celebrate Left Hook, raise cash for development, and to see the new space before it fully opened.
Third places like this become a reflection of the community. They are the connective tissue of the city that brings people together and expands the scope of our world beyond the trip from our beds to our workplaces.
Ringside
Modernity has made the connected world very large. Half the shops on any given street send profit to corporations with global headquarters and board members who’ve never set foot in our community. That scale is isolating. In response, it’s very easy to live one’s entire life around the twin pillars of Home and Workplace – especially when working from home merges these pillars together, and when everywhere else you go feels like everywhere else you’ve been.
The Left Hook and places like it hit back against this. They give the world texture.
Until fully opened, the new space is where Kristin roasts coffee – but that’s not to say it doesn’t get used. Coffee cupping sessions and production lessons fill the time between roasting alongside parties and movie nights for friends where a sheet covers the exposed brick walls and the projector does its best to give us a quality picture. These are intimate, but not exclusive.
When people ask at the counter about the new space, Kristin always invites them to come by. “If the door is open, just walk in!”
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