Since the first Tatte café opened in 2008, our baristas have served great coffee drinks made from blends that we loved. With our passion for coffee, it will come as no surprise that our coffee team started dreaming of a program that would be truly ours: built on our tasting notes, our vision for how the coffee would complement Tatte’s food and baked goods: a coffee that you could get at Tatte and nowhere else. What we dreamed about for 16 years has now become our reality: an exclusive, built from scratch coffee program brought to life with industry leading roasters.

No one knows Tatte like our team, and that’s why it was important to us to be hands-on through the entire process. It’s a thrill to hold a bag of Tatte Coffee in our hands, and to craft espresso drinks with coffee carefully selected by our Coffee Team. 

At Tatte’s Summer Street café in Boston, we met with the team responsible for Tatte Coffee to learn more about how it came to be. Jennifer Salamone (drink of choice: stovetop espresso at home and iced Americano with steamed milk at Tatte) and coffee trainer Sam MacNeill (drink of choice: pour over at home and oat milk cappuccino at Tatte) were delighted to share the details behind our newest blends. 

Jenn has long led Tatte’s coffee program. Her official title is Regional Vice President of Operations, but she has also earned the reigning title, “queen of coffee.” Her first experience with Tatte was as a customer, visiting our Charles Street café with her family for Mother’s Day. 

The experience of dining at Tatte left a big impression “I just fell in love with the brand,” she says. Jenn had a feeling working for Tatte would be the change she needed. When she joined in 2015, our fifth café had just opened and as she puts it, her role had a lot of variety. “At first, I was an assistant to our founder Tzurit. I didn’t just do coffee things, but really anything that was needed for the business. I’d go from café to café, work with catering, do HR stuff… then three months in, I took on the role of Director of Operations.” 

As Tatte continued to grow, Jenn built her team by bringing on some of the best baristas she knew. Her first call was to Sam MacNeill, a former colleague. With a laugh, she recalls telling him, “I’ll never make you work the cash register again.”

Sam began at the Charles Street café, which at the time was the newest location. “After a year and a half at Charles Street, I was tapped to help train the baristas for our next cafe opening in Harvard Square,” he says. This location was a notable milestone for Tatte not only due to its size (featuring two floors), but also its proximity to the  enormously popular tourist destination of Harvard University.

Even back in those days, Jenn and Tzurit were dreaming of where they could take the coffee program someday. Every trip they took invariably included stops at coffee shops where they’d try new things, always making note of single origin beans and blends that impressed them, or roasters whose work they admired. At one point, they even considered opening a Tatte roastery, but they decided that the best way forward would be to collaborate with industry-leading partners.

In November 2023, the pieces began to fall into place. Jenn and Sam, along with Antonia Petaccio, Sam’s counterpart in the Washington, D.C. market, and our head of culinary innovation Chef Can Akkaya, sat down together. They came up with what became the five guiding principles behind Tatte Coffee:

Then, it was time to look for the perfect partners. Jenn says, “As a working group, we spoke to eleven different roasters that we admired and felt would be able to bring our coffee story to life with us. We then visited five of them from Texas, to North Carolina, D.C. and of course  Boston. We met so many amazing people, tasted delicious coffee and had many laughs along the way.” In the end, the perfect matches turned out to be right in Tatte’s Boston backyard: George Howell Coffee for our No. 4 Espresso Blend and Gracenote Coffee for our T1 Drip Blend.  

George Howell and Gracenote are roasters we deeply admire, not just for their renowned commitment to quality and taste, but for the shared values of sustainability and relationship-building. Jenn says, “One of the things that excites us most about these partnerships is that they were born from a mutual respect and a sense of kinship, grounded in our shared dedication to crafting exceptional coffee. We worked together with both roasters to define the parameters that would get the best possible quality, by tasting and shifting the specific ratios of the coffee until we got it. Patrick, George and their teams were fantastic resources throughout this whole process.”

George Howell Coffee specializes in high quality single-estate and exceptional regional coffees. The company also offers one blended coffee, called Alchemy, that our team loves. “When we started to think about the espresso,” Sam explains, “we knew we wanted it to be smooth and approachable, with chocolate notes at the forefront and maybe some citrus notes, more classic in flavor. George Howell and his team began to play with the components that make up Alchemy. They experimented with ratios and other coffees to make a blend for Tatte that hit on everything we love about George Howell Coffee, with a little more Tatte specificity. We’ve managed to create something pleasantly different.”

When the Tatte team and the folks from George Howell reconvened for the final tasting, it was down to four blends. As Jenn tells it, “We started with the first one and it was great. Then the second one was even better. And the third one was better than that. Then we hit number four. We tried it and then knowingly looked at each other. It was the best one of them all. From that moment, it was decided.” 

Unsurprisingly, our coffee team happily spends their days off in coffee shops. Gracenote’s Boston cafés have long been places our team frequents for some of the best coffee around, particularly admiring a blend called Alpha, which Gracenote’s baristas use in their espresso drinks. It became the starting point for T1, which ended up being a blend of coffee from Brazil and the legendary Misty Valley bean from Ethiopia. “What I love best about T1,” Jenn says, “is that it’s approachable for the everyday coffee drinker, but nuanced enough for people who appreciate specialty coffee. They’ll pull some awesome flavor notes out of it that are really special, like the confected blueberry, the nuttiness, and the silky chocolate of it.” 

Despite its simplicity, there’s something truly sentimental behind its name,“T1”; this is what our team calls our very first café, which opened in Brookline, Massachusetts in 2008. T1 Drip Blend is a nod to where it all began—those early days when our guests drank their first coffees with us, and the effort, dedication, and gratitude that buoyed Tatte’s evolution from a farmers market stand to a successful, full-fledged neighborhood café.

After choosing the blends, naming them, and placing our first orders with Gracenote and George Howell came the exciting part: rolling out the new coffee to our guests. This meant training all the baristas in all twenty-six Boston area cafés and fourteen cafés in D.C., Maryland and Virginia.

“We trained all of our baristas to get them acquainted with the new parameters so they can navigate to the right flavor, or profile, when they make coffee drinks. We also shared all the background information so they can talk to guests about the new coffee,” Sam says.

“Roasters can perfectly roast the coffee,” Jenn adds, “but if we brew it incorrectly, it’s on us. It’s no longer beautiful. Our baristas own so much of this process, and we need to make sure the team understands the importance of how they execute and have the passion for their craft.”

For Sam, one of the best parts was getting to experience guests’ enthusiastic reactions. “I liked bringing an espresso drink over to someone’s table and saying, ‘This is our new coffee. Let us know what you think,’ then maybe popping back in a couple of minutes and see how they liked it,” he says. “One of the first people I talked with was a guest who comes into the South Boston café every day and drinks a few shots of espresso over the course of an hour. The guest said that the new espresso is by far their favorite!”

Jenn reports rave reviews from our team’s reactions to our new coffees, too. “They are finding a lot of joy in the new blends and bringing it into their personal spaces as well. There’s a lot of excitement, and that’s really great to see.”

Even better than our love of T1 and No. 4 and the excitement of making this dream a reality, is getting to share these blends with you, our guests. We can’t wait to make your favorite drinks and hear what you think about the tasting notes, how the blends pair with your sweet or savory food and otherwise “talk coffee” with you.