Felix Roasting Co.

One hour of WiFi, tied to your receipt, no exceptions. That's the policy at Felix Roasting Co. on Greene Street in SoHo, and it's the recurring sore point in the recent customer chatter. The room is the draw. Black-and-white checkered floors, velvety plush seating that customers call elegant or opulent, photogenic in the way only certain SoHo storefronts manage. Lively, popular, often hard to get a seat. None of that is in dispute.

The ricotta fig toast (with thyme and jam) is the move. The fog toast is the more interesting one. Avocado toast holds its own. A latte, a matcha, and you have the menu. Skip the hot chocolate, where a recent customer flagged chocolate sauce pooling at the bottom of the cup, which is the wrong kind of texture for hot chocolate to commit to.

Felix is built for a particular use case. You drop in for a photogenic SoHo coffee stop, you meet a friend for an hour, you take a few photos, you move on. The room delivers on that exactly. What it does not deliver on is a laptop session. The one-hour WiFi cap, the absence of outlets, and the requirement that you keep buying to keep your access alive all add up. If you arrive expecting to work for three hours, you will leave annoyed.

The staff is friendly, the bar is competent, and the toasts hit the level the room promises. Both indoor and outdoor seating are on offer, when you can find an open one. SoHo foot traffic does most of the work here, and the room is calibrated for that crowd: quick stops, sharp photos, friends catching up between errands.

This is a coffee shop that knows what it is and prices it accordingly. The mistake is treating it as something else. Order the ricotta fig toast, sit on the velvet, take the picture, leave before the WiFi kicks you off. Played that way, it works.