Charlotteville General Store and Coffee Roastery

Mark, the owner, gives meat scraps to a regular's dog through the window. That is a real story from a real customer, and it captures what the Charlotteville General Store and Coffee Roastery is doing in a tiny New York town most people have never heard of.

The building is a general store with a roaster on site and a kitchen turning out breakfast and lunch sandwiches built on Boar's Head meats. The coffee gets roasted right there in the building, and it also shows up across the county at The American Hotel in Sharon Springs, which is a small detail worth knowing if you are touring upstate. Local goods stack the shelves: dill cheese, kefir, the kind of things you load into the car when you are driving home from a weekend trip.

Outside, picnic tables. Inside, the kind of friendly local-store feel where the owner knows people by name and treats the dog at the window like a regular. Mark is the recurring named host in the conversation around the shop, and that personal touch is the experience.

What to order: the breakfast sandwich, a sub on a roll, pastries, a bag of freshly roasted coffee to take home, and whatever local food catches your eye on the shelves. The kefir and the dill cheese are the local-pickup items worth knowing about. Dogs are welcome. Travelers passing through rural upstate New York can do a coffee, a sandwich, and a grocery run in one stop, which is the entire reason a place like this exists in a town this size.

If you need WiFi or a cafe-style setup with table service, this is the wrong stop. It is a general store with good coffee, sandwiches, and a guy named Mark, and that is the right size for what it is. Better suited for travelers stopping through than for laptop workers expecting a setup.