Vigilante Coffee has brought new attention to downtown Hyattsville.
The coffee roaster, which had its grand opening Saturday, was recently featured in Time magazine’s list of things to do while in Washington, D.C.
And its new Hyattsville location got a lengthy write-up in the Washington Post:
From the coffee bar, which is decorated with skateboards showing the stages of coffee production, customers can watch raw beans go into the roaster before being weighed and packaged for sale, or ground and turned into a pour-over coffee or a cup of Flat White. “A lot of people don’t get it,” Vigilante says of the setup. “They’ve never seen raw coffee. I wanted to put on a show.”
The flat white is the latest sign of Hyattsville’s hipness, joining the bikram yoga studio in Riverdale Park, Busboys and Poets, the upcoming Whole Foods Market, wheatpaste art, the cupcake shop in the Arts District and organic food dumpster divers.
For the uninitiated, a flat white is a coffee drink made with two shots of espresso and steamed milk, first popularized in Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s. Basically, it tastes like a latte, but with more hipster cachet now that even McDonald’s sells lattes.
Like man, I was thrilled to see that a real coffee shop was coming to Hyattsville. The fact that Vigilante is small, independent and clearly passionate about good coffee, is also a big plus.
But after a visit, I am wondering if it can make it.
I enjoyed a very nice espresso for $2.50 not including tax, which is OK. It was quite good.
However having to stand on a concrete floorin a bare room to consume my coffee, seems to be asking a lot.
I may be a bit older than the intended target audience and will admit my hipster days are in the hazy past.
Still I’m wondering whether such an austere and minimalist version of a coffee shop will work here.
We’re pretty cool but this is still Hyattsville.
Keep in mind that Vigilante Coffee is a roaster, first and foremost. It’s not making its money as a coffee shop, or it would have located next to a Metro station in a far busier area.
Basically, they’re doing things they would be doing anyway most of the time, but if someone shows up, they make a little extra money fixing them up a cup of coffee.
— RTB