Just a cup of coffee...

more than enough.

A note before you read: This essay has nothing to do with current events, productivity hacks, or self-improvement. It’s just about coffee…and everything that coffee witnessed.

I know, I know…it’s ridiculous to write a whole essay about coffee. But sometimes something as mundane and basic-bitch as an oat cappuccino can somehow truly hit above its weight.

There’s this thing about coffee…it carries meaning we don’t always acknowledge. A basic search of “ode to coffee” found a slew of articles, poems, and songs that all wax poetic about the status, the ritual, and the identity. The difference between someone who grabs Dunkin’ on the way to work and someone who waits in line at a specialty shop for an $8 cappuccino says something, whether we want it to or not. Coffee is everything and nothing…glamorous and completely ordinary. It somehow holds all these contradictions at once. I see myself in that. (and maybe you do, too.)

For me, I’m realizing this particular cup has been the throughline of my reclamation journey…a supporting character that has witnessed every transformative moment in my story for the past five years. It has been SO much more than just the chemical reaction between coffee grounds and water. So much more.

I moved to NYC from Charlotte, NC, right as the world shut down in 2020. With the city eerily silent and essentially closed, I would go for solo walks around the neighborhood to clear my head and wrestle with the inevitable “what ifs” and incessant doom-worrying. One day that June, I stumbled into Black Press…the smell of perfectly balanced espresso luring me in like a true siren (not that other green one that keeps missing the mark). And I didn’t know it then, but from that day forward, Black Press would become a lighthouse for me in the storm I didn’t see coming.

The espresso at Black Press is special; they use Partners out of Brooklyn, and that espresso consistently hits all the right notes…rich and deep and bitter and bright…with a depth that makes you feel something other than warmth or a rush. When it hits right, you realize, it’s not just caffeine. It might just be life-changing…totally sounds absurd to say out loud, but completely, absolutely true.

Black Press was where I met Jess 2.0…this newest next iteration of myself, the version who would learn that she actually existed apart from the things she did, the roles she performed, the person she *thought* she was supposed to be. That first oat cappuccino grounded me when fear screamed louder than any possibility. The foam sat perfectly on top, thick and velvety, sweet from the oat milk. It felt like a hug…like real comfort, without trying too hard. The espresso underneath was bold enough to cut through but didn’t overwhelm…it was just bitter enough in all the right ways. It showed me this wasn’t JUST coffee…this was more.

Quarantined and cramped in a one-bedroom apartment with Jay and Millie, it all felt impossibly small. And there I was, drowning in guilt…the guilt that it was ME who pushed to uproot our entire family to NYC for my dream, only to be met with isolation in a tiny space where we could barely breathe. The rejection emails piled up. The silence from restaurants I’d applied to grew deafening. My attempts to convince chefs to give me a chance despite having zero experience because I “felt in my bones that I would be good” disappeared into the abyss. I mean, to be fair, they had no clue if their restaurants would ever reopen at that point.

I was stuck in this middle place between who I’d been and who I was trying to become, and Black Press became the place I would escape to. I wasn’t necessarily running from my family (not every time, at least), but I was running from the mental loop of self-doubt and second-guessing that threatened to swallow me whole.

But here…the baristas knew me by name. Even in those early pandemic days, they knew my face (above the mask), they knew my order, they knew ME. Which seemed impossible in a city of a bajillion people, but I know that’s how communities are built, small and intentional. That belonging, that seeing and knowing—it resonated and helped me build my own philosophy of feeding people, of creating space where someone feels recognized, where they matter.

The light in me recognized the light in them.

Once the world started reopening, I would grab countless coffees after dropping Millie off at school with school moms. I would meet my best friend Marie (my no.1 since our college days in SC) and the girls in our pandemic pod early mornings, excited to actually be going to work. These women became my safety net when I needed it.

Black Press kept me warm that next February, when I schlepped through the snow to tour 15+ apartments on the Upper West Side. I finally found a gem, a 1-bedroom with an office and a beautiful backyard, a rarity in the city. We landed on West 74th, exactly one block away from Black Press (not entirely an accident).

With my warm, familiar cappuccino in hand, I walked across the park to assist Zikki with a random catering gig that September. This wasn’t just any gig; this was the one that would give me a lifeline and my first foot in the door as she invited me to interview for a line cook opening at her restaurant.

It gave me the liquid courage I needed before my interview that next week with Chef Victor and GM Itamar at North Miznon. It was the cup that leveled my head and my nervous heart on my first day on the line. It held me every anxious morning after, as I busted my ass and moved from line cook to sous chef to head chef in less than a year.

By then, my order had evolved, and my life as I knew it started to unravel. My cappuccinos became flat whites…less velvet and more microfoam that blended seamlessly with the espresso, creating this silky texture that coated my insides. The sweetness dialed back significantly, the espresso pushed forward, bolder and brighter. It tasted like a woman who was finally starting to take herself more seriously, who knew what she wanted and who no longer felt like she had to apologize for it. Bolder and brighter.

I grabbed a life-altering cup of coffee before a very difficult conversation with Jay that fall, the one where we decided to separate and end our 16-year marriage. It was that same cup that Marie brought to me when not just my life was crumbling around me, but my bones were as well. It was that year on my birthday that I broke my leg at the restaurant…and for the next 3 months, I was homebound…sleeping on the couch, reeling from my marriage ending, and SUPER depressed as my swift kitchen rise came to a screeching halt.

That next February, I bought a round of coffees for my fellow line cooks who helped me pack the U-Haul and move into my first apartment by myself once the separation was official. It was a moment of strength in the middle of my unraveling.

Over one of those coffees, sitting and making my weekly to-do lists, I was hit on and asked out for my first date since my 16-year marriage had dissolved. My dating era…something most people have in their twenties…started in my late 30s at a table by the very window that first showed me who I really was.

In the thick of my chef life, I was working 80-hour weeks and fighting for scraps of time with Millie as we clunkily navigated co-parenting. I'd pick her up from Jay in the mornings just to get 20 minutes with her before school. I’d bring her to Black Press for hot chocolate, trying to make it count. And it was over one of those cups that the whisper came, bold but quiet, saying I needed to walk away from the job I loved and choose a different path for the sake of my daughter and my limited time with her.

My flat whites eventually graduated to red eyes at this point, when I needed something stronger. A shot of espresso dumped into drip coffee…no milk, no fluff, just pure function. Bitter as hell, unforgiving, the kind of coffee that tastes like determination and exhaustion in equal measure. A true sign and mirror of what my insides looked like.

I had a red eye in hand on my last day at the restaurant when I feared all that I had accomplished and worked for, all that momentum I had built up…would just…fucking…disappear.

I had Black Press in hand on the train to the West Village on my first day as head chef & consultant for a few cafes. I just needed something warm and cozy for my fragility, to calm my second-guessing. I truly thought I’d found a unicorn, the perfect-on-paper gig that fit my new single-mother schedule needs.

It was there over a particularly frothy flat white when I realized the job was nothing more than thinly veiled abuse of power…a boss using her single-motherhood and toxic girl-boss vibes as a weapon against her employees, me included. The coffee gave me the courage to resign after only six months.

I was learning to walk away, to choose myself, to trust that gut feeling in my bones.

I had Black Press in hand as I walked to another coffee shop (ironic, yes, I know) to meet Yas for our first date in August 2024. A new beginning that changed everything.

We got flat whites on the way to the airport for a 10-day yoga retreat in Oaxaca with my dear friend Lauren…something I’d always wanted to do but never gave myself permission to. Oaxaca was where I finally got clarity on who I wanted to be and where I wanted to head next.

My walk grew a little further from Black Press, 3 blocks from our apartment with my now husband, Yas. It was that same cozy corner by the window where I sat to brainstorm and dream of what The Freckled Fork could be if it were my sole focus, my only job, and all it could become.

These days, I STILL get my weekly flat whites there…on my way to pick Millie up from school, to take her to dance, to therapy, to wherever she needs to go because my schedule is now my own and I finally found freedom in that.

This is the Jess 2.0 I’ve been rebuilding and rediscovering, once my “prescribed burn” had finally simmered and the ashes began to settle. This version feels the most like the me I was always supposed to be. And this coffee from this tiny coffee shop on the Upper West Side…it STILL roots me, it STILL grounds me, and it STILL makes me feel at home…in my body and in this city I now claim as my own.

I know how this sounds…it’s absurd to give this much meaning to something so ordinary. But in the moments when I felt empty and scared and lonely…so fucking lonely…it was the warm hug I needed, the bright spot in the darkest parts and hardest moments of my entire life.

It’s just a cup of coffee,

but it changed my life.

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