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Tropicana, Atlantic City

Slow roasted fine

By Ariella Cohen
The Brooklyn Paper
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The Brooklyn Paper / Graham Letorney

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Coffee is best prepared and enjoyed behind closed doors, according to a long-awaited court ruling that has finally, after four, slow-roasting years, ended Brooklyn’s best-loved coffee maker’s bitter dispute with city environmental officials.

Don Shoenholt and Hy Chabbott, owners of Gillies Coffee Company, a bean-roasting plant on 19th Street, found out this week that a judge had upheld a city ruling that the smell of roasting coffee is indeed a pollutant.

Needless to say, they’re as sad as a cup of lukewarm Folgers.

“To say that coffee should be treated like the effluxes from a waste dump is absolutely thoughtless,” said Shoenholt, the president of the 166-year-old, family-run business that supplies java to Fairway, as well as some of the city’s fanciest dining rooms and restaurants.

Shoenholt has been fighting City Hall since 2002, when a city inspector dropped by after an anonymous complaint and issued a $400 violation after (surprise) smelling a strong odor of coffee roasting.

“He said that the coffee smell ‘annoyed’ him,” said Shoenholt. “They call it fugitive odors. I call it natural odors.”

The city and Gillies have declared a cease-fire — for now at least.

“[Inspectors] won’t go roaming for [coffee] odors, but we are complaint-based,” said DEP spokesman Charles Sturcken.

©2007 The Brooklyn Paper

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