Bodega Coffee Culture

The bodega coffee served in a blue and white paper cup with the "We Are Happy to Serve You" Greek motif is an object that has outlived the diners and coffee shops that made it famous. Design has become a symbol of New York in the way that yellow cabs and fire escapes are symbols. Leslie Buck designed the cup in 1963 for the Sherri Cup Company. Three Greek key columns with the Anthora urn were meant to appeal to the Greek diner owners who dominated the New York coffee scene at the time. Coffee inside is unremarkable by any specialty standard, usually a medium roast brewed hours ago and kept warm on a hot plate. Ordering "light and sweet" and receiving a cup that costs $1.50 while specialty shops charge $6 for a pour-over is a daily act of defiance against coffee culture. The cup isn't sold in bodegas anymore as widely as it once was, replaced by generic white styrofoam. Design persists on mugs, t-shirts, and tattoos as a nostalgic marker. Original manufacturer stopped production in 2012, and the cups available now are licensed reproductions. Form factor and the graphic are so embedded in the visual culture of the city that their absence is more notable than their presence. I think the Anthora cup is a good example of accidental design. A functional object created for a narrow commercial purpose became a cultural artifact because it was present at enough important moments in enough people's lives. It did not try to mean anything. It just showed up every morning and eventually it meant everything.