Motors Coffee brings Paris technique to Brooklyn

Motors Coffee, the Paris café run by 2025 French Brewers Cup champion Thomas Philips, is serving its full menu in New York for the first time this weekend, taking over Sey Coffee's Bushwick café in Brooklyn on 19 and 20 September. The two-day residency is Motors' first appearance behind a US counter.

Motors is a small, motor-racing-themed café in Paris that Philips opened after his 2025 French Brewers Cup title put a spotlight on his sourcing and brewing choices. The shop has built a following for pairing precise extraction with a stripped-back, workshop-style space.

A trade in techniques, not just beans

Two days, one counter, and a technique Paris coffee shops don't usually export.

The pop-up menu centres on Philips' competition-winning technique: espresso drinks made with freeze-distilled milk, a process that removes water content to concentrate the milk's natural sweetness and richness before it reaches the cup.

Sey Coffee, the Bushwick roaster hosting the residency, built its reputation on transparent sourcing and light-roast profiles distinct from Motors' Parisian style. The pairing lets each shop's regulars taste a competition method rarely served outside brewing championships.

Motors and Sey are also releasing a limited collaboration box built around a washed Panama Geisha from producer Digna Nuñez, processed at Lost Origin's lab in Panama City. Each box includes a graffiti-inspired Motors x Sey t-shirt and a ceramic mug handmade by Peyton Perron, with the shops describing every unit as individually hand-painted and unrepeated.

Pop-ups become a specialty coffee circuit

A ticketed cupping session with Lost Origin ran on 18 September, ahead of the pop-up's opening, giving early access to the Geisha lot before its release in the collaboration box.

The residency follows a run of international café takeovers this year, including stops by Denmark's Coffee Collective and Arkansas roaster Onyx Coffee Lab, as independent shops use short exchanges to reach customers who would otherwise never cross an ocean for a cup.

For Motors, the Brooklyn stop tests appetite for its freeze-distilled milk technique among a market already absorbing sharp swings in green coffee costs, as exporters in Brazil report record volumes at higher prices this year. Whether the technique travels beyond a two-day counter depends on whether Sey's customers order it again once Philips is back in Paris.