On a late evening on Fresh Pond Road, the dimly-lit Cute Cat Cafe is just about half-full, the wood panel walls lined with various photorealistic images of cats. Opening suddenly some seven years ago, quickly if not thoroughly remodeled out of one of the neighborhood’s many nameless “stir-fries & tacos” joints, it was part of a generation of cafes that slowly swept the neighborhood over the last decade. In front of a counter, on a nearby bulletin board, some hundred hand-drawn cats can be found and, nearby, a handsomely laminated print out laments: “Please [Don’t] Stay With Only A Water…We Are Not Happy To Put This Warning.” Around most of the tables, real estate brokers can be heard busily upselling the neighborhood to their sweatered clients and, last month, the scene attracted the attention of Starbucks, which opened its newest outpost down the block.

“I won’t be renewing my lease,” Yusuf, the cafe’s owner, tells me on Instagram, when I ask about the new competition down the corner. 

The new Starbucks isn’t the first corporate chain to find itself this deep along the local M line. Just the other month, it seems, a new Dunkin Donuts had opened up shop two blocks down.  

“Starbucks now is in a bigger place which has a lot of seating…people don’t choose to go to small businesses; they go to [ones with a] name even though they are more expensive,” says Yusuf.  “It affected other small coffee shops as well, as far as I know.”

Just across the street sits the Nest and around the corner, you can find the Green Spot Cafe, all recent additions that have made a steady, tricking business out of the architects of the slowly changing neighborhood, generally pouring out of the train station. A block further down sits Delight Diner, a shoebox-sized Greek diner that has called the Forest Avenue M Station home since the 1970s. Another of the block’s newer cafes, Sofia Gourmet popped up a block away in 2021, selling coffee, sandwiches and a polite assortment of Italian groceries; the self-explanatory European Coffee Bar has illuminated the same side of the street for, perhaps, time immemorial. 

The arrival of a Starbucks felt portentous, the beginning or end of something, a collective signal reading: here comes everybody. “A one-unit increase in the number of Starbucks in a given year is associated with a 0.5 percent increase in housing prices,” reads a prominent report published a few years back, penned by a trio of Harvard economists that correlated data from Yelp with “price growth on Zillow.” It’s true that Starbucks’ have been inching into the neighborhood over the last year, with a new one landing in Bushwick just months earlier. Perhaps this was why this one had arrived singularly and without fanfare, as if a little ashamed of itself, quietly creating the illusion that it had always been there to begin with.

It had been noticed, nevertheless, the very weekend before it opened, by way of a post on a community Facebook page that attracted some 87 comments. Like news of a flying saucer, people appeared mixed about what this sudden arrival meant. “If you don’t like this, get involved. Community Board 5 makes decisions such as allowing this coffee store to be here,” read one. “Finally. I’m surprised we didn’t have one prior,” read another. “Well the yuppies are coming,” said a third. 

“It’s very interesting,” the anonymous operator of an Instagram account that complains about local graffiti told me when I asked them what the arrival of the Starbucks meant. Whoever this person was, they were watching the price of nearby real estate too. “It means Ridgewood used to be [only] prime and desirable near the transit friendly area of the Bushwick border, but people are [now] moving upwards to the M train and Fresh Pond Area known as ‘Upper Ridgewood,’” they said. 

Others welcomed the competition in so-called Upper Ridgewood. 

“I am a firm believer in the more the merrier,” Crystal Williams told me; she’s one of the owners and chefs at Norma’s and Julia’s, two cafes that kickstarted the cafe rush into this corner of Queens. She doesn’t think Starbucks will sway her regulars.   

“The customers have been incredibly supportive since we opened. I don’t think that will change just because they have one more option to choose from,” she says. 

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Photos taken by Andrew Karpan.