Mountain Province
Coffee from the highlands of the Philippines, pineapple scones and a café built as a love letter to a grandmother.
Mountain Province Espresso Bar in East Williamsburg, Brooklyn, built its identity on a region most New York coffee drinkers had never heard of. Its beans came from the mountain regions of the Philippines, including the highlands of the Cordillera, where the province that gave the café its name is found. The space was designed as an homage to the owner's lola, the Filipino word for grandmother.
Filipino coffee, explained
The Philippines is one of the few countries that grows all four major commercial coffee species: Arabica, Robusta, Liberica (locally known as barako) and Excelsa. Highland Arabica from the Cordillera, including Benguet and Mountain Province, has drawn growing attention from specialty roasters for its sweetness and body. Farms there are often small and family-run.
What made the café special
- Sourcing with a story: fair-trade, single-origin beans tied to a specific place and its farmers.
- Filipino baking: regulars praised the pineapple scones, coconut muffins and picadillo buns.
- A homey room: a neighborhood café that felt like someone's grandmother's kitchen, and a favorite place to work.
The legacy
Mountain Province has since closed, but it was part of a wave of Filipino-American cafés and bakeries in New York that put ube, calamansi, pandesal and Philippine-grown coffee on the city's radar. If you love Filipino flavors, look for those ingredients on menus around Queens' Woodside ("Little Manila") and in Brooklyn and Manhattan cafés.
Want a coffee institution that's still roasting after more than a century? Read about Porto Rico Importing Co.
