A Crown Heights Coffee Shop Expands With Ambitious New Restaurant and Nightlife Hangout

Crown Heights coffee shop Daughter is expanding: Co-owner Adam Keita says he and the team are opening a new Crown Heights restaurant called the Wall, at 241 Kingston Avenue, near Sterling Place in July. It’s part of a larger restructuring of the business, and an attempt at “bringing more nightlife to this part of Crown Heights,” says Keita.

Daughter opened in spring 2021 with an ambitious community-oriented mission from Keita, Sarah Elisabeth Huggins, and Brian Stoothhoff, baristas who met while working at Partners Coffee. To date, the coffee shop offers housemade pastries, coffee, and a dinner menu. With their new restaurant, the Wall, the team will expand to a full-blown restaurant space a block from the coffee shop. The menu will be Mediterranean, with North African and Greek influences, led by Dennis Spina, formerly the executive chef at the restaurant at movie theater, Metrograph, and alum of the shuttered Roebling Tea Room, who has been running the temporary nighttime food program at Daughter. Spina will join as an additional partner at the Wall.

In the back of the Wall, there’s a bar area and a music-listening room. “We want options for the neighborhood, there are a lot of people who live here, but a lot of people have to leave the neighborhood to be young and go out; there are not a lot of sit-down restaurants on this side of Crown Heights,” adds Keita. The Wall basement will have a built-out production facility to supply pastries to Daughter as well as build out a wholesale program to work with other coffee shops as an alternate revenue stream.

When the Wall restaurant opens in full, Daughter will cease its dinner program and instead flip into a wine bar at night, with paired down small plates, led by Ava Trilling, one-half of the natural wine pop-up Rude Mouth and the wine manager at Four Horsemen. In April, Daughter will close for a few weeks to remodel the space to operate as a more functional bar by night, while remaining a coffee shop during the day. “Adam and I are long-time friends, and to be working on this new chapter of Daughter is really exciting,” says Trilling. “The goal is to have the bar emulate the same local, familial feel as the cafe; we want this to be your neighborhood spot for a few glasses before a dinner, date, or nightcap.”

As for the transition at Daughter, Keita says the “all-day cafe models are really hard to make work” and he hopes by separating his businesses into the buckets: restaurant, listening bar, wine bar, coffee shop, and wholesale bakery, all within in a block radius, enables a more sustainable path forward.