Black Crow Coffee’s Grand Central District location feels somehow familiar and comfy, like stepping back into your favorite room at Grandma’s house. It’s decorated with worn old furniture, knick-knacks, and the sort of crazy-quilt works of art collected over a lifetime’s worth of travels.

Make no mistake, however – this is a coffee bar well-steeped in modern technology for your working convenience. Everywhere you look, among the ragtag furniture with mismatched chairs, stained glass, and album-cover mosaics, are men and women leaning into laptops, WiFi working, chilling, or doing a bit of both, a steaming mug of coffee or tea at the ready.

People like to spend hours at Black Crow. It’s just that comfortable.

The Grand Central café is the second Black Crow location. The first, in Old Northeast, has been in business a little bit longer. It was only after Greg Bauman and Deanna Hawk opened it (in 2015) that St. Pete’s explosion of hip coffee shops began. “We opened it up because we live three blocks away, and there was a totally cool corner that was historic,” Hawk says. “It wasn’t something that we spent a lot of time thinking about. We saw it and said ‘That would make a great coffee shop.’”

This location opened in early 2019 and quickly became a local favorite. The whole operation is organic – pastries are either baked on-site, or sourced from local bakers; coffee beans come from Peru, Brazil, Bali, Kenya, Honduras and Costa Rica, and roasted (approximately 600 pounds weekly) by Bauman in a back room of the Grand Central location.