The San Francisco office and café where someone is definitely working right now.
Photo: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images
New Yorkers jonesing to drink coffee as they refinance their mortgages have long enjoyed the corporate charm of bank-owned cafés including the Santander Work Cafe in Williamsburg (“Where a Bank becomes your Community”) and the Capital One Café, which expanded over the past year to six Manhattan locations. (Not to mention the bright-orange early-21st-century ING Direct cafés in midtown, now gone.) For those craving a latte served by an AI-powered insurance provider, however, there’s simply been no place to go — until now. Corgi, a San Francisco–based startup backed by $378 million in VC funding, is planning three “Corgi Cafes” in Manhattan.
As reported in the Commercial Observer, Corgi’s first New York location will be on East 27th Street in Nomad, operating 24/7 in the space formerly occupied by the event space and cocktail venue J. Bespoke. Corgi’s website says Tribeca and Chelsea are next.
So what do you get when you cross a café with an insurance startup? Look no further than the original, opened last February in San Francisco. Billed as a “A Cafe Open 24/7 Because the World’s Greatest and Most Impactful Work Doesn’t Stop,” it styles itself as a hub for founders who caffeinate and go all night. Nico Laqua, Corgi’s 26-year-old CEO and co-founder, told the San Francisco Gazetteer that he decided to open a café after being saddled with a retail space that came along with its new fifth-story HQ. Rather than sublet the storefront, Corgi decided to turn it into a canteen “for people who really want to work, for builders.” Everyone at his company, Laqua told the paper, is already required to work seven days a week. A handful of employees actually live upstairs at the office.
The San Francisco Corgi Cafe menu lists protein chips and $14 smoothies along with “exclusive drinks” named after other AI startups, such as the “Brexspresso,” after the expense-management platform Brex, and the “ElevenLatte,” a reference to the AI voice-generation startup ElevenLabs. You can add creatine, spirulina, or a collagen peptide booster to your drink, presumably giving you a glow of health that will allow you to return to your ceaseless grind.
Since opening, the San Francisco café has received 172 Google reviews averaging 4.2 stars. “A place you will be welcomed and encouraged to ship fast, iterate harder, PMF or bust,” wrote Cindy. “An engineers wet dream,” said Dima. “Instantly became a 10x founder as soon as I crossed the door,” said Raphael. (Is he kidding? Unclear.) On the flip side, several noted that the café can be crowded and dirty, and quite a few reviewers complained about the dearth of actual Corgi dogs (Trudy, a Corgi owned by one of Laqua’s co-founders, makes an occasional visit). “There are no Corgis in this coffee shop. It is a complete scam,” wrote Patrick M. on Yelp. “These people should be put in jail for lying.” For the record, in New York City it’s technically illegal to keep a dog in a café. A seven-day-a-week, 24-hours-a-day employee, however, is permitted.
Update, July 29: Shortly after publication of this story, a Corgi representative told us that employees no longer live there.
