Conservatory For Coffee, Tea & Cocoa

The shelf here goes to farm level — Dukunde Kawa's 459 farmers around the Mbilima station, printed on a bag in a shop that opened in 1995. Three decades on, the drum still turns where customers can watch it, a choice this family has never seen a reason to reverse.

• beans to take home
• reading without wifi
• loose-leaf tea
• hot chocolate

All of it is roasted in-house, and the seventeen bags on the shelf name the washing station, the altitude, the varietal and the process — but not the roast date.

The roaster still runs at the front of the room, right beside the seating, and more than fifty loose-leaf teas wait in gold tins along the wall. A local family opened this Washington Boulevard room in 1995, which is longer than most of the coffee bars in this city have been alive.