Good to know there are some good, old-school places to hang out, espe­cially when they serve excel­lent cof­fee. Being a Russian myself, I always think about revolutions…just kidding.

I met with Tony Dreyfuss, Metropolis’s owner, in order to share his story with you.

V.     I love your ideas about what a cof­fee house should be like. Is Metropolis café liv­ing up to your expectations?

D.     Absolutely! Our café is pretty big, over 3000 square feet. We could have well over 100 peo­ple at any given time; it can be pretty fun and loud with argu­ments, or it can be really quiet like a library when every­one is work­ing. Plus, most of our cus­tomers come from really diverse back­grounds and this is really impor­tant to our busi­ness, since we praise and regard the dif­fer­ences between people.

V.     How did your busi­ness come to life?

D.     Sometime around 2002, me and my dad found our­selves at the Coffee Fest in Seattle, where we both got really jacked up on caf­feine and bought a Diedrich IR12 cof­fee roaster with no place to put it. It was quite an impulse purchase.

A year later, the Metropolis café and roas­t­erie came to life in Chicago.

In 2007, we won the MicroRoaster of the Year award, which helped us grow quite a bit, and in 2008, we moved to a sep­a­rate roast­ing plant because we felt that we couldn’t con­trol the qual­ity if roast­ing in more than one location.

Now we have two really old Probat roast­ers – a 15 kilo from the 1930s and a 45 kilo from the 1950, and we expect to roast about 700,000 pounds of cof­fee this year.
That is pretty much the thumb­nail his­tory of our company.

V.     What could you tell us about the cof­fee scene in Chicago?

D.     Well, first, there are not nearly as many inde­pen­dent cafés in Chicago, as there are even in a much smaller city like Seattle, for exam­ple. Coffee cul­ture is just begin­ning its growth, and every­one who is open­ing a café here now is extremely qual­ity focused.

Secondly, I think Chicago has a drip cof­fee cul­ture. Espresso now makes up 60% of what we sell, but when we first opened, over 80% of our sales were drip cof­fee. So, we really are drip cof­fee lovers at heart, and I think that it’s pretty com­mon through­out the city of Chicago as well.

V.     How is the busi­ness going dur­ing the cur­rent eco­nomic downturn?

D.     The busi­ness has been amaz­ing; our growth is tremen­dous, but sus­tain­able. Due to the econ­omy, the rent is low, so we are able to have a big­ger space to accom­mo­date every­one, and it turns out that peo­ple want to drink cof­fee no mat­ter what the state of the econ­omy is.

But really the strengths of this busi­ness are the peo­ple that work here: from the ones that work in our café (we have a really low turnover rate) through­out our roast­ers. We want every­one to have a firm grasp on what they are pro­duc­ing, and because of that we have been able to han­dle a high rate of growth.

V.     What do you think makes you unique?

D.     What I think makes us unique is that many cafés have ser­vice and space, but they don’t nec­es­sar­ily have the cof­fee to back it up, and in some places, they have the cof­fee, but they don’t nec­es­sar­ily have the ser­vice and space. I think that we have man­aged to have the cof­fee, ser­vice and the space – all in one.

However, I think what really dif­fer­en­ti­ates us is that we hon­estly want amaz­ing cof­fee to be acces­si­ble and approach­able for peo­ple that maybe haven’t had an out­stand­ing cof­fee before. We don’t want any­body to walk in for the first time and feel stu­pid if he/she doesn’t under­stand some­thing. For exam­ple, the descrip­tions of our cof­fees con­tain just a few words, and they are not florid. We are not try­ing to turn peo­ple off: we really want peo­ple to under­stand that this is some­thing that any­one can under­stand. It is just the mat­ter of tast­ing and com­ing very much to your own con­clu­sion rather than being told what your con­clu­sion should be.

V.     Is there some­thing else that you would like to share?

D.     Yes, to begin with I just wanted to say that none of this would be pos­si­ble with­out my father Jeff Dreyfuss. He is a really strong part of the busi­ness, and he is very much the face of the company.

Secondly, I think that our main pur­pose in the world is try­ing to gen­tly con­tinue the process of learn­ing. Like Metropolis as well, we don’t claim to know every­thing about cof­fee, we try to keep learn­ing too: for exam­ple, over the last three years we have devel­oped a blend just for iced cof­fee, called Prospero, and this year we have dis­con­tin­ued dark roast­ing. We have taken roast level com­pletely off our pack­ag­ing because we feel that our cus­tomers are ready for that. And we gen­uinely feel that our place is to move things to a more learned state, not that we know what it is yet, but we will keep going.