I’ll admit it: A Capital One café caught my eye in February last year after its grand opening in the lacuna of a shuttered Victoria’s Secret at 2 Herald Square, its chamfered corner windows, breezy blue-and-blonde color story, and tambour accents standing out from a muddle of drab retail storefronts. That and the half-price coffee offered to cardholders. (A cappuccino for $2.72 is a unicorn in this town.) Back then, I hadn’t realized the history and scale of the bank-café endeavor.
In New York, this phenomenon can be traced back at least to 2001, when the American arm of the Dutch multinational ING opened its first coffeehouse in Midtown. Capital One inherited the concept when it acquired ING’s US banking operations after the financial crisis and has recently set about revamping and expanding its portfolio of cafés. There are currently four in Manhattan, plus one in the Bronx and fifty-nine others around the country. Now more banks are giving espresso a shot. Santander has operated a penal-sounding “Work Café” in Williamsburg since 2020, and on Union Square West, a C…