Arthur Delot-Vilain photo
Co-owner Paul Crosby: "The dirty chai is a crowd favorite."
After eight years of slinging coffee on the streets of New Haven, the Jitter Bus has brought their dirty chais and espressos to a newly opened brick-and-mortar store on the northern end of Wooster Square.
On Wednesday morning, the storefront at 847 Grand Ave. was mostly empty except for Paul Crosby. He’s one of the Jitter Bus’s two owners — along with co-founder Dan Barletta. The new site “soft opened” two weeks ago, and the bones are good. Plants, Jitter Bus merch, and coffee-themed art decorated the well-lit room.
“The dirty chai is a crowd favorite,” Crosby said as Paul Simon played over the store’s speakers. “My personal favorite is a caramel latte,” he added, explaining that his brother AJ, the store’s Coffee Director, is starting a syrup company that makes what he thinks is the best caramel syrup.
This reporter, wanting to see what the hype was all about, ordered a dirty chai — small, iced, whole milk. While Crosby milled the beans like a pro, he explained the rationale behind the new store. The operation had been based in his apartment, and the “kitchen was engulfed in paper goods.” He said that new owners raised his rent and so he moved in with his fiancée.
“We needed a new place to park the bus. A friend knew the owner of this place.” The space was so beautiful, Crosby said as he added the chai concentrate to the drink, “we couldn’t pass up on it!” The new Jitter Bus Coffee location is owned by a holding company controlled by app developer Bruce Seymour. The store used to be Martone’s Dry Cleaners, which, Crosby said, was “not only a dry cleaner but a community space.” Crosby hopes to cultivate a similar role for Jitter Bus Coffee.
Business is slow so far, but that’s by design: “We’re trying to take it slow” to work out the kinks, Crosby said. Even just setting up Wi-Fi was harder than he expected — he had to call four providers before finally finding one who could provide service.
They hope to have everything running smoothly for a grand opening on July 7. But fear not: the Jitter Bus will still be wheeling around New Haven even after the brick-and-mortar launch. “That’s what’s gonna make us money,” said Crosby.
Crosby's Night of the Hunter-style knuckle tats.
Coffee is only part of Crosby’s life — he’s a lifelong skate rat and lately, he’s taken to birding. He grew up wanting to be a tattoo artist, but fell out of love after completing an apprenticeship. After leaving the ink business, he worked as a barista at a Starbucks in a Stop & Shop, where he received “rigorous coffee training.”
By 2016, he was working at G Cafe while Barletta and AJ worked at Blue State Coffee and Maison Mathis (now Maison B). Because they “all loved this stuff,” Barletta and Crosby decided to start a coffee bus — a low-overhead option — with their friend Andrew Mesiouris. From there, Crosby said, “it all just snowballed.” Crosby described himself as a shy person who’s motivated by “love of being a barista” because it forces him to talk to new people.
In the early years, the Jitter Bus had some difficulty sourcing beans and finding a roaster, but now they have two. They get some of their beans from Giv Coffee in Canton, Conn., a company run by husband-and-wife team Jeff and Emily Brooks. Jitter Bus Coffee was an early adopter of Giv: “[Brooks] was doing this out of his garage and we were his first clients,” Crosby said. Their other supplier — mostly for espresso — is the Newington-based Saccuzzo Coffee. “Not many places do both,” said Crosby.
But having two suppliers is far from the only thing that sets Jitter Bus apart. Crosby’s brother AJ, who joined the company a few years after the founding, has started doing informal “how-to” coffee classes with Yale graduate students — “how to” do a pour over, “how to” pull a good shot of espresso. Coffee education initiatives are afoot — Crosby is working on training programs to make sure his employees are “super knowledgeable about coffee, whether they want to be or not.” He said he wanted to make sure, for example, that each employee knew the three parts of an espresso shot (from top to bottom: crema, heart, body) so that they could answer customer questions.
Paul Crosby's notebook of coffee tips and tricks.
Crosby then pulled out a notebook where he keeps detailed sketches and notes of new coffee tricks and techniques he’s testing out. For him, cleanliness is key to making good coffee. Espresso leaves a lot of residue in cups, so Crosby likes to rest his cups on the water boilers of his Faema E61 espresso machine after rinsing to make sure they’re “dry, clean, and hot” for the next pull.
“If all else fails,” Crosby said, “I’ll go back to tattooing.”
But the neighborhood is already looking to the new store. Even without any fanfare, Al Patel, an employee at Hollywood Package Store, a liquor store across the street, tried some Jitter Bus Coffee last week. “Nice coffee. Good guy,” Patel said.
And he makes a mean dirty chai, this reporter thinks.
Jitter Bus Coffee -- no wheels.