The handshake that ended the coffee war
Two cafés, one block, eight months of subtweets. How a city-council aide walked them both into the same room.
If you live south of 14th you watched the coffee war in real time, and if you don't, you probably read about it anyway. Two roasters, one city block, and a feud that moved from Google reviews to Instagram stories to, eventually, a local TV segment nobody asked for.
What actually happened in that back room
The room was, improbably, the community center upstairs from a laundromat. The mediator was a 29-year-old council aide named Daniela Rojas who had, until that week, mostly worked on zoning variances. Both owners showed up with their lawyers. Everyone ended up with pastries.
“It took eight months and forty-seven minutes. The forty-seven minutes is what mattered.”
The agreement, such as it is, is not public. What is public is the joint Saturday pop-up they announced the following week, and the fact that both cafés reopened with a shared porter schedule that cuts a delivery fee both of them had been paying — separately — for two years.