It was my secret escape to experience a specialty coffee while finishing assignments.
I then discovered the Hungarian Pastry Shop in the Upper West Side near Columbia’s campus. Although I don’t frequent the chain much anymore, it was my entry point into the community of coffee, where I could have a space that felt like belonged to me anywhere I went in the city. I remember finding solace in the various cafés strewn throughout the city. Shanita Nicholas: I didn’t start drinking coffee until I got to college, which is also when I moved to New York. But even then, those interactions were almost as an outsider-I never found that one place where I truly felt at home, sipping coffee, taking in the smells and sights, watching passersby whirl around me, lost in my own thoughts. It was only as I got older, went to high school in Manhattan, and eventually off to Cambridge for college and law school, that I really began interacting with coffee shops. I’m talking Brooklyn, New York, in the ’80s and ’90s. Propaganda aside though, there weren’t many cafés in my community growing up. Pretty funny because fast forward, here we are opening a coffee shop.
Whenever I did have coffee, it was a treat-I was breaking the rules and being a rebel amidst the rampant “propaganda” that coffee was bad for young girls like me.
You can hear some of their ideas and insights about gentrification in the April + May 2018 issue of Barista Magazine, and in this article we take a closer look at the business partners and the space they’ve crafted for their local community.Īshley Rodriguez: Did you grow up with coffee in your life? Do you have any early memories of drinking coffee?Īmanda-Jane Thomas: I was definitely more of a tea girl growing up. They chat about placemaking, creating connection within their community, and the lessons learned from their business partnership.Īmanda-Jane Thomas and Shanita Nicholas met as lawyers in New York, and are now the owners and operators of Sip & Sonder, a café and creative-use space in the Inglewood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Amanda-Jane Thomas and Shanita Nicholas are the co-founders of Sip & Sonder, a café and creative space in Inglewood, Calif.
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