An A For A&A

I have returned to tell you that there is a magical coffee shop on 21st Street. Resting safely in a temporal vortex just east of Sixth Avenue, A&A is marked by a battleship grey sign so perfectly old fashioned as to look like cheap set dressing. When I first spotted the coffee shop, walking from the F train to the office where I’ve been interning this semester (and which has guaranteed me a little bit of paid work after I graduate!), that sign had me wary. Surely there was no way that the powers orchestrating New York’s lunches would put such a perfect hole-in-the-wall in between my subway and my desk. Surely that lunch counter—chipped enamel and sagging backless stools—was a mirage. And surely the griddle, scoured clean and always-smoking, was a figment of my imagination, and not the harsh realities of a 21st Century dining market.

Somehow, I was wrong. A&A Coffeeshop is real, and the world is better for it. I’ve eaten there four or five times in the last couple of months, and though I went there hoping for a reliably B-rate ham and cheese, the man looming over the griddle clearly had something special on his mind. Here is a fellow who likes to exceed expectations.

“Ham and cheese,” I said, and was met with an unimpressed stare. “On a roll?”

With a look of palpable disappointment, he replied “That’s all?”

Apparently the guy likes to use his griddle. And his fry vat. And his foodwarmers. And whatever other equipment he has in the back. I’ve eaten at the counter several times since then—had breakfast there just now, a top-notch $3 bacon, egg and cheese—and have seen locals pop in for huge plates of food to go, picking up roast pork, mashed potatoes and rice and beans. The city gave him a coffeeshop, and this man has turned it into a restaurant.

I would call him the last of the short order cooks, but I’m praying that there are more like him out there.