daniel noonan

When you walk through the glass door into Kos Kaffe, you’re hit with gentle smells of roasting coffee, smoke off the griddle, and flowers. Seafoam green paint accents the otherwise white walls. Plenty of sunlight gets in through the nearly floor-to-ceiling windows facing 5th Avenue. There are wood floors, a few large wooden tables for sharing, wooden stools and chairs. Leafy plants and, currently, corn and baby squash, adorn the shelves and furniture. Large mirrors reflect the incandescent lighting, chandelier, art and knickknacks. Flowers potted in glass jars run down the window ledge. Kos Kaffe has the cozy, modest, yet eclectic feel of a country home. 

In this space, Allon Azulai and Sarah Huck Azulai, husband-and-wife owners of Kos Kaffe, have been serving delicious coffee and food to the Park Slope community since 2012. The atmosphere is exactly what they had in mind when the idea first came to them. “We were striving for warmth, conviviality, and communion,” Sarah says. “No doubt I was probably picturing my favorite way to experience a café — a rainy day, a little jazz, a friend across the table, a hot mug between my hands.” Indeed, when you sit down, you’ll find strangers sharing a table to work, friends meeting over coffee or a meal, a group of parents in the midst of a discussion, children close by. Many small details also contribute to this sense of familiarity and communion. In front of the royal green drum roaster, hand written signs describe the five different types of freshly roasted beans offered; another placard, next to the sugar and honey, lets you know the straws are made from corn and are 100% compostable; the card attached to the coffee tree (which stands next to the counter and the small, open kitchen) explains how it got there, where the fruit, that eventually becomes coffee, comes from. It’s this attention to each detail, the sense that everything has been carefully thought over — in addition to the quality of the coffee and food — that helps you feel you’re in good hands. 

Allon has been a coffee roaster for decades and Sarah has a deep and varied culinary background. At the time of the café’s inception, she was working full-time, writing a cookbook, and developing recipes as a freelancer. Frequently working in coffee shops, she became tired of the usual fare and wanted to create something different: “…food that you might make at home for breakfast or lunch if you had the time and skills to do so.” What you find are big, lush salads, tasty sandwiches and breakfast dishes, soups that, like everything else, are made from scratch. Many of the ingredients employed are sourced from farms and producers in the surrounding areas, or found at the local Greenmarket. Specials rotate based on what’s available. Recently, there was a market salad made with kale, radicchio, apple, fennel, bulgur and Mimolette cheese; also, a simple but decadent plate of ricotta, plums, and honey over toast. The coffee is, of course, roasted on site, and Allon works to source quality beans that promote fair practices. 

On the café’s website, it states that from the beginning, “…the aspiration was simple: give our Brooklyn neighbors a truly local, family-owned coffeehouse to call home.” How else, besides the quality of the product and friendly atmosphere, is this achieved? By not just working within the community, but with the community. One way they do this is by collaborating with other businesses in Park Slope and surrounding neighborhoods. They get their almond milk, for example, from Trans Am Café in Brooklyn, and Kos Kaffe roasts their coffee in return. They buy their flours and other grains from the Greenmarket Regional Grains Project, and Sarah does an occasional cooking demo for them in the market. Kos Kaffe participates in, and is one of the pickup locations for, the community-supported fishery program run by Mermaid’s Garden, a weekly fish share bringing sustainable seafood to Brooklyn. Kos Kaffe takes part in the Taste of Fifth every year and, on October 17th, will join the Park Slope Civil Council’s Food for Thought. And events are constantly in the works at the café: open-mic nights, art shows, and pop-up dinners. 

With any kind of new business, it can be tricky to grab footing, “…to gain the trust of a community, to demonstrate that your values aren’t just lip service, that you operate with mutual concerns and interests in mind, that your business reflects something deeply felt, not just a livelihood,” in Sarah’s words. In the six-plus-years since its opening, that genuine quality has been persistent, and is one of the reasons Kos Kaffe has remained such a hub. “Park Slope is such a vibrant, creative, intelligent community,” Sarah says, “and I have pretty much developed all of my relationships standing behind the counter or clearing someone’s dishes and connecting with them in a neighborly way. Over the years, that builds on itself organically.” Even if it is your first time walking through the glass door into Kos Kaffe, not yet knowing anyone, that sense of community is felt and will be there to come back to.

Photographs by Daniel Noonan