Lulu's Coffee - New Haven

About Lulu

Lulu's love affair with coffee goes back to when she was a young girl drinking espresso after dinner with her Grandfather Luigi and with her father William at his luncheonette. Her father, known as Willie Mac, owned and operated a much loved business in New Haven where she worked. ate wonderful food and drank dark, fresh coffee which was freshly roasted daily at McDonalds Roasters on Chapel Street. The smell of roasting coffee filling the air in downtown New Haven on any given day.

She founded her tiny coffeehouse in 1991 and since then it has garnered a reputation near and far for the quality and strength of the coffee, the wonderfully eccentric people that gather and the discussions that happen organically. Customers from all walks of life loyally meet and enjoy a cup of coffee with a side of conversation.

Lulu's passion for great coffee has led to exclusive blends that are roasted by boutique roasters. The blends are as distinctive as they are powerful using only the freshest most flavorful beans from around the world.

In short Lulu loves coffee..... the smell of it, the color, the rich dark taste of it and wants to share that love with as many people as she can.

Review by Constance Markiewicz
If someone wrote the treatment for a sitcom based on Lulu's, the network execs would dismiss it as far-fetched: A breakfast-and-lunch cafe where world-class legal and literary scholars hang out with cops, artists, postal workers, surgeons, soccer moms, grad students, actors and three-year-olds grabbing bowls of granola on their way to daycare. When surgeon and Lulu's regular John Sundin shipped out to Rwanda with the International Committee of the Red Cross during that country's devastating civil war, he faxed each day's reports from his field hospital back to Lulu's so that the clientele had more moment-to-moment info from the struggle than the UN did. Sundin's Lulu's file later got published in Harper's.

Each morning and noon the faithful squeeze into Lulu deCarrone's tiny, art-filled cafe not only for the beautiful breads, pastries and sandwiches, but for the boss' sparkling intelligence and wit. As for the famously herculean strength of the house coffee: A Lulu's devotee who recently had to leave New Haven for a month reported with bliss that, after the hiatus, that first cup of Lulu's "lifted the top of (her) head off."