By Justin Rocket Silverman | New York Daily News
Byron Kaplan serves an iced latte to Sara Stracey from his cart at 10th Ave. and 23rd St.
An upstart barista is giving new meaning to the phrase “sidewalk cafe.”
Byron Kaplan has turned an old roasted nut cart into a coffeeshop on wheels — transforming the to-go culture of street food into a sit-down scene with his six plastic stools.
“I’m hoping this will help change the streetscape,” says Kaplan, who sets up his espresso cart on Sixth Ave. and 44th St. on weekdays, and on a tourist-heavy stretch below the High Line at 10th Ave and 23rd St. on weekends. “The idea is to create a mini-cafe where people can hang out right on the sidewalk.”
Kaplan isn’t the first man to serve sidewalk java — croissant carts have long poured cups of joe streetside, and the popular Mud coffee truck upped the ante with its mobile menu of caffeinated beverages.
But using the smallest space, Kaplan goes furthest to replicate the brick-and-mortar coffeehouse experience with his seating and meticulously made beverages including caffe latte ($3.50) and macchiato ($3), all made with upscale Counter Culture beans.
That’s not to mention the cart’s real glass cups.
“You can’t even drink out of glass at Starbucks,” says the 29-year-old Australian entrepreneur, who is willing to serve his beverages in paper cups on customer request.
Byron Kaplan serves his espresso in glass cups. His Fiend cart also offers caffe latte, cappuccino, macchiato and iced coffee.
But prices at Starbucks are slightly cheaper. For example, the chain’s caffe latte of the same size (8 ounces) is $3.26.
Restaurants must apply to the city for a sidewalk cafe permit before they can set up outdoor seating, and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene says street vendors can’t put anything on the sidewalk except an “adjoining acceptable waste container.”
But Kaplan says his stools shouldn’t put him in hot water, claiming he operates in a gray area because he keeps them neatly stacked unless a customer wants to have a seat.
It’s a nuanced legal position for a man who until last month had never sold a cup of coffee in his life.
Kaplan had recently given up his job in construction management after an aging nut cart, chained to a building in Alphabet City, caught his eye.
He stopped to look at the abandoned pushcart every day, and a handful of neighborhood hustlers tried to con him before he tracked down the actual owner, bought it and outfitted it with an espresso machine and coffee bean grinder.
He calls the cart Fiend as an ode to his product’s addictive nature.
Customer James Bond 3rd takes advantage of the stools Byron Kaplan puts out near his cart.
And thanks to the quality of his drinks, the convenience of his plastic seating and the surprising experience of stumbling upon a gourmet-coffee seller on the street — Kaplan is winning over passersby one cup at a time.
“This is the first time I’ve ever seen an espresso cart,” said Sara Stracey as she biked past the cart under the High Line. “It looks homemade and I like that about it.”
Indeed, Fiend is a do-it-yourself endeavor, right down to the hand-written menu scribbled on a piece of cardboard and stuck to the side of the cart.
It’s a true labor of love: Kaplan can’t say exactly what inspired him to start Fiend, spend seven days a week manning his cart, and get out of bed at 5 a.m. so he can be open for the morning rush.
“It hasn’t been done before,” he says of his operation. “I thought to myself, an espresso cart could work. That it should work. So I wanted to see if it could be done in this city where everything seems to have been done already.”
It certainly seemed to be working on a recent sunny Sunday, when Fiend was doing a brisk trade in iced lattes for $4.
“In the right neighborhood this espresso cart could really work,” said James Bond 3rd, 41, a real estate broker from Brooklyn. “There are a lot of coffee snobs in Manhattan that won’t do Starbucks.”
Starbucks might be a coffee-selling rival, but like many street cart vendors, Kaplan has an affinity for the chain: It’s where he goes when he needs a bathroom break.
