Impress Your Clients With A Meeting At Coffee Project’s “Slow Bar”

A quick ten-minute walk from The Wheeler — on an unassuming street where you’re more likely to find trucks unloading than folks meeting for coffee — you’ll find a truly special cafe. What’s unique about this spot is not the tasteful decor or the professional-grade gadgets or even the farmer’s market pastries — although each of those alone is worth a visit. Nope, the draw of Coffee Project is the people, specifically owner Chi Sum Ngai, whose passion for coffee is so intense that she studied to become a Q grader. (A Q grader is the highest professional accreditation one can achieve in the world of coffee; it is kind of similar to becoming a sommelier in the world of wine.) And it all started humbly enough, according to Sum, when she and her partner Kaleena Teoh turned “a love of drinking coffee into a deeper love of brewing coffee.” The shop in Downtown Brooklyn is their second (the original is in New York City’s East Village) and they chose the aforementioned sleepy Randall Place location for its “proximity to everything, but distance from the main action.”

Aside from the quintessential coffee offerings we’ve all come to expect neighborhood-wide, Sum and her team at Coffee Project also offer the unique experience of the Slow Bar. Here, you and your guest are treated to a short coffee presentation and a tasting experience where you’ll witness incredibly precise measuring and pouring, and hear descriptors like “chocolate-forward” and “malted” while you sample the most high-quality beans. On a recent visit, we sampled a pot of iced coffee made right in a Chemex, Japanese drip-style, which we highly recommend drinking all summer long.