Plowshares Coffee Roasters

The wifi resets every ninety minutes. To keep working, you have to re-order, which is one of the cleaner ways a New York cafe has figured out how to keep the laptop crowd from camping all day on one cortado. Plowshares Coffee Roasters on Amsterdam Avenue near 125th in Harlem has the roaster visible from the floor, a grand piano taking up real estate near the window, and most of the tables most days occupied by people typing.

Sunday afternoons change the room. From about two to four, Plowshares hosts free live jazz, with the Will Lyle Trio and other rotating sets. Monthly open mic for the people who play. This is the thing that pulls non-laptop customers in, and it's worth scheduling around. The piano isn't there for show.

Order the iced americano with an extra shot if you're settling in. Cortado or cappuccino if you want something tighter. The A-Train Espresso is the in-house roast that supplies Sugar Hill Cafe down the way, so it's worth tasting at the source. Focaccia sandwiches and piadinas anchor the lunch menu. Pastries come from a Lower East Side bakery, and the almond croissant, cinnamon roll, strawberry cheesecake pastry, and pumpkin pastry are the rotation worth knowing.

The room has big open windows, natural light, lots of tables and bench seating, two restrooms, and self-serve water. No outdoor seating. The other thing to know before you go: service-dog handling has drawn serious complaints, more than one, which is a fair flag for anyone bringing a service dog to a cafe. Worth weighing.

For Harlem and Columbia laptop workers who can structure their day around a re-order every ninety minutes, this is one of the better rooms north of Central Park. For Sunday jazz fans, it's a free reason to be in the neighborhood. The combination of in-house roaster, live jazz, bakery pastries, and a working-friendly room with a built-in turnover mechanic is the kind of thing only a Harlem cafe with this much floor space could pull off.