I like to drink coffee in interesting places and almost never get it to-go. I can make coffee at home; I’d rather buy it where I can enjoy a different space, away from my house or office. Though there is a considerable population of street-walking sippers, there are many café-table sitters, and I prefer a table to spilling hot coffee on myself as I walk. I also sometimes need to freshen my eyes on a bit of writing I’m doing, or to give a student’s writing a more generous read than when I first viewed it. That means a café, which should be interesting but not demanding. There should be people, but not always at my table. I’m always looking for that perfect balance.
I rove too much to be a regular in just one café, but I approach regularity in a couple of places. I like it when a worker knows me well enough to anticipate my order and when I feel at home in a “third space,” which could be both social and solitary, that sense of being comfortably “private in public.”
There is a category between regular and incidental visitor, which I might call “the irregular.” The two Somerville places I’ve visited this past week will be on my rotation for their good coffee and interesting ambiance. On the second visit to each I’ll be able to settle in and read a book – the first visits were so distractingly interesting that I would have found it hard to focus.
New Leaf Espresso
I’ve been trying to describe this place to friends since my first visit a few days ago. It’s a remarkable space combining a beautiful barber shop with a serious espresso/coffee bar, simultaneously hosting hard-working laptop-tappers and towel-draped customers, heads being sheared, reflected in big vintage mirrors. The air is scented agreeably with coffee and some kind of pomade, with notes of leather chairs and wooden barrel-café tables.
My friend thought the beautiful green walls had a Scottish resonance, and the white woodwork caught the afternoon light, giving the room a painterly quality. The pressed-tin ceiling completed the vintage atmosphere.
A cheerful manager, Eoin Jaquith (pronounced “Owen”), told us some of the place’s history. The building was once an insurance office, and the white columns just inside the entrance reflect that era and purpose with a sense of solidity and safety. The barbershop, now “Razors,” was next door, and expanded into the small insurance office. In 2004, owner Anthony Berriola built out the space to overlap with coffee service. The café is worker-owned and collectively governed, joining other local independent cafes such as 1369 and Circus Cooperative (on Putnam Avenue in Cambridge – on for next week!). Eoin says New Leaf has been given “an incredible opportunity” because the barbershop “really wanted us. We wish everyone could have a chance like this.” He says that saturation of cafés has not been reached; there’s room for many more.
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Pastry at New Leaf Espresso in Somerville. (Photo: Marc Levy) -
An artistic coffee drink is ready for a customer at New Leaf Espresso in Somerville. (Photo: Marc Levy)
And now it’s more than time to talk about the coffee. Eoin made a drip coffee for me and a decaf Americano for my friend. Both were very good, and, sitting at one of the table-topped barrels on smaller leather-topped barrels, we wallowed in the simple pleasure of coffee in a good space. Pastries are by Lionheart Confections, the coffees by both Broadsheet and Café Reynard in Malden, teas by the ubiquitous MEM teas. Lionheart, which makes things such as malted-strawberry-crunch doughnuts, won Best of Boston’s Best Doughnut of 2025.
The café area has three small tables and two leather armchairs. (Where we sat was nominally for barber customers, but it was a quiet day.) There is a takeout window and some chairs and a bench outside. A guitar near the door has a qualified invitation: “Musicians, play us a song. Just don’t suck.” There’s open mic on the last Sunday of the month.
Barbershops have long been flexible and welcoming, social and productive beyond their definitional functions. New Leaf embodies this with the café and reflects it in a print of Norman Rockwell’s “Shuffleton’s Barbershop,” in which the viewer’s eye is drawn past the shadowy barbering equipment to a brightly lit back room where old guys are fiddling and plucking and generally having a great musical time. Now all we need is a barbershop quartet singing “Sweet Adeline.”
True Grounds
“We had a wedding reception for a couple who met and dated here.” The manager with whom we spoke was so proud of this that I began to fantasize about this space, a large storefront with scant decoration but for local artists’ work and painted wainscoting halfway up the walls. I call my fantasy genre “rom-Som” – a romance set in Somerville, such as this café, where regulars and locals who seem, even without Wi-Fi, to spend a good chunk of their days. This, like many places, can be seen as a blank slate on which to write many stories.
In my scenario, two people appropriately Somervillian in attire – earth tones, maybe wearing the same Tandem T-shirt from a Portland Maine café – meet here by chance and proceed to do so intentionally, solidifying their relationship in this space. But matters outside True Grounds interfere and they have one “last” coffee here to say goodbye. Their table, sanctified by their many visits, remains empty for a long time; regular customers know to leave it alone. Until one day, one of them arrives to sit there quietly and, as if by Hollywood magic, the other arrives and they make up. Rom-Som: Find each other, break up and make up. Carrying the storyline further, the couple could be the people who just came in, pushing a baby carriage. Or True Grounds could be, just as easily, the site for a Som-noir, but let’s talk about real life in this space.
At 8:15 a.m. a youngish lineup of customers await their dawn dose of to-go energy. A few tables are taken by solitary sippers, one grading actual papers, to me a wonderfully nostalgic sight because these days most students’ papers appear online.
The coffee here is Broadsheet, as it is in many local cafés, and I note gratefully that this one uses a medium roast for espresso and a medium-to-light roast Ethiopian Yrgacheffe (notes of blueberry) for drip coffee. It also uses Pavement’s roasts, but I didn’t get to try them. You may know that espresso is a method, not a roast level, and that it can be made deliciously with lighter roasts than most people think. (Coffee geek moment: Caffeine does not relate to degree of roast but to density of brew and method. Espresso, for which very hot steam is forced through the grounds then condenses and drips as liquid into the cup, has very low caffeine because the water has not sat in the grounds for long, and thus the infusion [and caffeine-gathering] time is short. In making filter or drip coffees, the water sits in the grounds for up to 3 or 4 minutes, extracting much more caffeine along with flavor.)
The manager-owners, Kevin and Michael (both graduates in physics), “want people to care as much as we care” (about the coffee and the experience). The food is prepared with local ingredients, as possible. The “sunny egg and cheese sandwich” features local eggs and sun-dried tomatoes and cheese from Vermont. There is also Brazilian-style pão de queijo (cheese buns), pretzel croissants, avocado toast and an array of scones and breakfast burritos. Breakfast is “all day” (i.e., whenever the shop is open).
I hope to see two people meeting cute here, perhaps over a croissant or an iced chai. Camera ready, roll ’em.
New Leaf Espresso, inside a Razors Barbershop at 308 Highland Ave., Spring Hill, Somerville (7:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday; 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday and Sunday)
True Grounds, 717 Broadway, Ball Square, Somerville (7 a.m. to 2 p.m. Monday to Friday; 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday)
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