Hungry Ghost

A bartender’s read at the counter

Beckaly Franks reads a room before she reaches for a bottle; as bartender at Hungry Ghost in Civic Center, New York City, that habit belongs as much to the counter as to the bar. Her line into this place runs through Portland rooms where pace mattered: Thunder Ranch, Dixie Tavern, and Clyde Common, each with its own demand for service rhythm, drink execution, and the quick guest read that separates a filled order from a held room. In Hong Kong, Franks co-founded The Pontiac in 2015, a bar with a direct house culture and a clear operating stance on inclusivity and gender equality. Across 2015–2024, that work moved from shift craft into bar-building. In 2024, she co-founded Hungry Ghost and took proprietor roles at Artifact and Call Me Al, extending the same discipline across several rooms. The New York café at 165 Church St is not presented as a cocktail address; it is a daytime coffee counter. Franks’s presence matters because her craft is hospitality under pressure, the practiced work of keeping standards, staff, and room culture aligned while the guest sees only the cup placed in front of them.

Single origin, cold brew, counter pace

The Civic Center Hungry Ghost works in the language of specialty coffee rather than a full bar program: single origin pour-over, espresso service, and cold brew on tap. The chain began in 2012 in Prospect Heights, Brooklyn, and its coffee program is anchored by Stumptown Coffee, the Portland roaster whose beans give the counter a clear through-line from brewed cup to cold draft. Those are different kinds of patience. One happens in front of the guest, at the pace of the kettle. The other is prepared before the first order lands. Pastries sit beside the coffee program as a simple companion rather than a separate bakery claim, and no named pastry collaborator is published for this address. The method here is daily repetition, not spectacle: the same counter gestures, the same espresso standard, the same cold line held through a neighborhood rush.

The room between Civic Center and TriBeCa

At 165 Church St, the room carries the scale of a small neighborhood café: counter service, limited seating, conversational noise, and the kind of quiet that lets a laptop open without turning the place into an office. Hungry Ghost’s broader New York identity is cozy and modern, but the Civic Center branch earns that through practical details rather than décor language. The guest moves from the door to the counter, orders coffee, chooses a seat if one is free, and settles into a room built for short stops that can become longer ones. The chain’s Brooklyn origin still shadows the Manhattan branch, not as nostalgia, but as operating memory: a specialty café that grew by making the daily cup reliable enough to become routine. In a city full of counters, that is its own discipline.

A chain held by repetition

Hungry Ghost now operates across Brooklyn and Manhattan, with recent reports placing the group at 12 to 13 locations. Growth can thin a café if the bench loses its standard; here, the work to follow is the ordinary test of keeping single origin pour-over and cold brew steady from one counter to the next. At Church St, that test lands in the guest’s hand as a cup from 165 Church St.