BY CYBELE POLICASTRO

I met Aaron Dahan this past January as he was just starting construction for Caffè Aronne located on Greenwich Avenue in the West Village. He explained how he had fallen in love with the vintage scooter called the Piaggio Apé on a trip to Italy. He shipped one back to New York and converted it into a mobile espresso bar under the name Caffè Aronne. He and his team also started selling their own beans and this led to the cafe. We recently caught up on Zoom.

The transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

BSB: When did you open?

It was March 8th. I think the West Village is one of the best-informed neighborhoods in the city, people are very aware of what is going on in their community, outside of their communities. We opened during a quiet week and I remember, it was March 16th, when I said, okay, we're going to close for the time being.

BSB: How did you adapt your business when you had to suddenly close? I noticed on social media, it seemed like you came up with some ways to serve the community.

AD: We initially started selling cold brew. We bottled different sizes for some of our customers, and same for our beans. And then, we said let's deliver some bottles of our cold brew to the hospital, right there on Seventh Avenue. We dropped off a hundred bottles and people loved it. People reached out saying, “Thank you, this really helped”.

Lenox Health, Greenwich Village, Photo Courtesy of Aaron Dahan

And I was talking to a friend of mine who said, maybe you should try to see how many bottles you can deliver, like set a challenge. So, we said, okay, let's see if we could deliver, two thousand bottles.

So, we donated about two thousand bottles and by the following week, we had so many people saying, can I help? What can I do? So, we said, let's open up, you know, these small eight-ounce bottles or nine-ounce bottles that we were usually selling for four dollars. We said, let's make them available to our customers at two dollars each. And they can sponsor people they care about.

We had people from California that had never even tried our coffee who said, I love what you're doing, here's fifty dollars, please send this to a hospital of your choice. And people would say, here is twenty dollars, please send these to my father who works at NYU Langone. Send this to my cousin who works at New York Presbyterian. And so far, we have delivered seven thousand bottles of cold brew.

BSB: Do you think this experience is going to affect your business going forward?

AD: I think it has affected us also a lot. I liked to think that we were an ethical, nice company, but today there's no doubt about it. Another project we're starting,which I'm really excited about is, we're going to be donating five percent of all of our sales to a different organization that we believe in every month. So, for instance, June, we were set on The Trevor Project We felt that was appropriate. Now, we're decided to divide it between The Trevor Project and the NAACP.

I'm looking forward to being able to do good and to make it extremely easy for our customers to do good.

BSB: So, then this period went by and then you finally were ready to reopen and then you had to shut down again due to the curfew. What's your mindset going forward?

AD: I mean, it was a little bit of a setback. Personally, I very much do support the protests. I think this is very, very important. I think we're just like really excited and really eager to get into it.

Aaron Dahan, Photography by Erica Freudenstein

Caffè Aronne is open 8am -7pm Sunday - Friday and closed Saturday

112 Greenwich Avenue, New York, NY 10011