BY TARA BURKE

Another café review coming your way! For the past week I’ve been working from cafés and I always find it kind of difficult to find a café in Manhattan that I can set up in for the day. A lot of NYC cafés and bookstores are pretty small and some even have table time limits, which doesn’t work if you want to spend at least 3 hours diligently working in one space. After filtering through several yelp reviews and asking people for recommendations I ended up at McNally Jackson one day and 11th St. Cafe the next.

McNally Jackson was recommended to me because it has little individual college style desks for doing work in their café. It is primarily a bookstore with two floors of great books to peruse through and is located on Prince St. in Soho. Their café area is pretty tiny and can get packed, but if you get there at the right time on a weekday you will most likely be able to grab an individual desk. If you have a lot of stuff that you have to spread out or a large laptop this might not work for you, as they are intended for the good old days of pen and paper class note taking. They have approximately 8-9 small tables for two though that would work perfectly. I recommend McNally Jackson if you have a paper to write or just want to have a good cup of coffee and read a book. There is NO WIFI so don’t go there if you need to use the internet, which I did. I didn’t think to check if they had wifi, so I ended up just enjoying my coffee and doing some writing. A little unexpected downtime is always welcome. 🙂

I had no idea where I was going to go to work the next day, so I ended up just heading downtown. I found myself at the 11th St. Cafe  in the West Village. It is also small, but has a large menu that includes both food and drinks. You won’t go hungry working here! They had maybe 6 tables for two that are placed tightly together, but they had wifi and plenty of outlets right against the seats. It wasn’t too crowded when I went, so I don’t think they were enforcing the 45 minute table limit, but during a rush time keep the time limit in mind. It is also on a pretty quiet street during the day, so if you’re anything like me and get distracted by people watching try this place!