Parliament Espresso and Coffee Bar
Click right to take a look around…
For me, the moment when this cafe fit most perfectly into its 1000-piece puzzle form was when an instrumental of Aladdin’s “Arabian Nights” began to play from some built-in sound source. In fact, you can probably find a few levels of puzzles (250 pieces, 500 pieces, 750 pieces) in the NY History Store that it is connected to. Considering that this cafe is the official one for The New York Historical Society—a free-standing partition signaling separate jurisdictions and acting as the key prop for the Parliament Espresso & Coffee Bar set—the muted imagination struck me. The menus are on hanging chalkboards and there is a chalked up mural of Henry and his LA VIRGEN COFFEE from Nicaragua, a scene—stylized like an etching—of a typified cafetero holding a branch of Arabica and another collecting coffee cherries into a woven basket. It’s an odd ode to the bucolic in this interior’s otherwise suburban clean. With one longer coffee table—with some industrial black rectangular tubing extending above it—and a cheese danishes plea from a regular customer, it might not be a chapter in the museum’s history, but it will at least claim a line, an epitaph.
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Drink: Cappuccino
It’s not a third wave masterpiece, but rather your tasty, run-of the mill cappuccino. For what it’s worth, for a museum cafe, I’m impressed. That 2-group, yellow La Marzocco FB80 is an unexpected bit of coffee competence...not to mention beautiful beginning of a beverage. While you can’t take your drink into the exhibitions, you can take it along the outer perimeter. A coffee from here doubles as an accessory to an up-close view of the Waldorf Astoria Lobby Clock (currently undergoing restoration at the museum and soon to be returned to the hotel) or a quick peek at New York’s 1970s graffiti evolution. Coffee and history, history and coffee...and all New York City.
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Price: Cappuccino (12oz.)=$5.25
Hours: Wednesday–Sunday {9–15:30}; Monday–Tuesday {CLOSED}
Extra Notes:
There is a WIFI network, but it is impossible to access no matter how hard my phone tried—impenetrable both by LTE and my IPad.
One other note: GoogleMaps shows this cafe as being on the south side of The New York Historical Society. It is on the east side, closer to the entrance.