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 Chase branch occupies the site of the historic Union Square Coffee Shop, its former use meagerly gestured toward with a Joe’s Coffee outpost connected to the foyer.
Just around the corner, situated between Whole Foods and Max Brenner, Chocolate by the Bald Man, Capital One’s recently renovated Union Square location slings single-origin pour-overs from third-wave roaster Verve (which replaced Peet’s as the café’s supplier in 2023). I moseyed in one lunch break, craving a respite from the office Keurig machine and its abysmal pods. The coffee was decent and there was no line, but the wait was oddly longer than at coffee shops with lines.
If it weren’t for the ATMs in the vestibule, you wouldn’t know this was a bank. The tellers are hidden upstairs, with the coffee bar, coworking space, and reservable meeting rooms, dubbed “nooks,” occupying the ground floor. A firm behind one of the branch designs describes the achieved atmosphere as “subdued”; it does feel that life is being sucked out of you. The overall effect is a copy-paste job of the undead Instagram aesthetic: flaxen faux bois for days, bowdlerized MCM, an abundance of beige, a fiddle-leaf fig.
Evidently, the Capital One cafés aim to counteract the closure of local bank branches by enticing millennials—in the popular imagination, a graying generation doomed to peonage and precarity because we overspend on avocado toast—to bank IRL. “In the long run I’ll be able to financially, like, save more. Right now I don’t feel like I’m doing that,” a woman with a middle part confesses in one of the venture’s slick promotional videos. In the same ad, a latter-day lumbersexual laments the opacity of the financial services industry: “There is a lot of information behind closed doors.” He’s not wrong. Capital One caught a lucky break this month when the Trump administration ordered the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to drop a suit alleging the bank intentionally misled customers about its 360 Performance Savings Account, instructing its employees to push a lower paying, similarly named product instead. According to the CFPB, Capital One’s ploy fleeced its customers out of more than $2 billion.
Perhaps that’s why my espresso is so cheap. Still, a deal is a deal. On my second visit, I chose to spend the long wait enclosed in the bathroom, where I was sure to avoid the “café ambassadors” and “coaches” who offer customers pro bono financial advice. But even there I wasn’t free from the sweet, millennial-targeted corporate nothings: A decal on the mirror encouraged me to “REFLECT & RECHARGE.”