Today’s Edible Manhattan NY1 segment — they run once per hour Fridays and Sundays — is on Dallis Bros. Coffee, a 100-year-old city coffee company we profiled last April. The show provides a two-minute peek inside the brick building on Atlantic Avenue where Dallis has been roasting and blending beans since 1926, turning from retail to restaurant clients after the World Wars, and moving from horse-drawn carriages to Model Ts to trucks.
Dallis was started in 1913 by two Eastern European brothers — Abe and Morris, who were given their name by Ellis Island officials, says Dallis Bros. VP John Moore, who shows off the shop and talks a bit about Dallis’s history in today’s piece. (In fact they were originally the Dallas brothers, he says, until some early registrar got it wrong.)
Back in Abe and Morris’s day, Moore told us, by the way, most coffee roasters made just one house blend: “You kind of hung your hat on it.” These days Dallis creates many types of blends and also single varietal coffees, all of which are made from beans bought directly from small farms that follow sustainable practices — except for the 25 percent that come from Dallis Bros. own farm in Brazil. By asking old clients and employees, the company has been researching that original house blend flavor profile, however, in hopes of maybe bringing it back in some modern form.
