Our Name Is Mud

Within 3,000 feet of Astor Place, there are, by my count, nine Starbucks Coffee shops, two Mudtrucks and what’s known as the MudSpot. The Mudtruck, one of two, is bright orange in color and usually perched at Astor Place near Cooper Union. They peddle $1 coffees to Union and NYU students and freethinking coffee fiends alike. The MudSpot, its brick-and-mortar counterpart, sells not only coffee but also wine, beer and food like their famous apple pancakes as well.

And though the Census Bureau doesn’t keep any hard statistics on coffee shops per capita, I’m convinced that the area, boxed in by Washington Square Park to the west, Union Square to the north, First Avenue to the east, and Houston to the south is among the highest in the world outside of Seattle in milligrams of caffeine per human.

When Nina Berott, 33, and Greg Northrop, 43, started the Mudtruck in 2001 with $70,000 in loans from friends and family, this was already the case. Berott had worked in advertising before they started the truck, and Northrop had been a musician. They were married just months before opening their first Mudtruck seven years ago.

At the original location at Astor, the warehouse-like Starbucks flanks them a hundred yards to the west at Lafayette and Astor, and another sizable one is a hundred yards to the east at Third Avenue. And there they sit in the middle, spitting distance from the 6 train stop. Their unlikely success over the past seven years has been well documented, and now, outfitted with two trucks and the MudSpot on East 9th Street between First and Second avenues, they’ve grown into a brand of their own.

But the brand, as it were, is starting to act like one, even if they plan to grow, in their words, ethically, and on their terms.

Since The Village Voice reported last spring that a rival truck—Brooklyn's Brown, one I tried in vain to track down over the weekend—miffed Berott and Northrop by parking just four blocks away from their Astor location, Berott says she has not heard of them since. But she considered the whole episode an affront to their style of business.

“We would never attempt to park in front of a small coffee store,” she says. “That’s why we’re not in Williamsburg.”

 And now, Berott says, they’re considering a lawsuit against a company based in Detroit, Mich. for what they consider to be a stolen logo and stolen name.

“It’s a creative insult,” Berott says, “I can’t believe capitalism let’s them get away with that.”

The company in question calls themselves Mud Coffee, and according to their website, www.drinkmud.com, they sell canned coffee drinks, emblazoned with a logo that is a lightly borrowed reproduction of Mud's logo, the now-familiar wavy, 1960s-esque circular patch that she drew by hand in 1999.

Mud here in New York doesn’t sell canned coffees for now and doesn’t plan to in the future, Berott says.  “Who knows if I want to do it?” Berott says. “Who knows if I will do it? But these guys should not inhibit me.”

Berott and Northrop’s lawyers sent cease-and-desist letters to DrinkMud.com in December and haven’t heard much from them since, but for now a lawsuit will just continue to linger. 

What these two episodes suggest is what Mud seems to want to take pains not to admit: that their logo and their product are now a hopping business. Forget the story line of this little truck in Astor Place and recollections of a certain biblical story starring a certain soldier skilled with a slingshot and a well-armored 10-foot giant. It’s no longer about that. Mud is well-ensconced in Lower Manhattan. I went to the Mudspot on Sunday morning, and the narrow space, perhaps impossible for my 6-foot frame to lie down in horizontally, had a not-small gaggle of customers out the door, waiting to be seated. Mud now has the resources to, when they want, rev their dieseled engines.

Berott says that for them, too big “would be the moment where mud would not be an alternative rebel brand.” But as much of a great success story that the Mudtruck is--and it is, indeed, a phenomenal one--by choosing Mud over Grande lattés, or by buying a Mud T-shirt for their 6-year-old instead of a new Starbucks-sold Rolling Stones comp, it’s hard to believe that, aside from some quaint notion of New York liberalism, customers are doing more than just symbolically giving the finger to the Starbucks giant.

And, what’s more, it’s hard to give companies like Mud a pass when it comes to patting yourself on the back for giving your dollars to a non-corporate entity. Sure, their coffee is indeed better, and, sure, they’re not a multinational behemoth, and, sure, their coffee is fair trade, but the “mom-and-pop” description doesn't fit a company that at this point likely pulls in the not-low seven-figure revenues. (Berott did not say what current revenues were, but according to a New York Times profile in 2004, their revenues that year were more than $900,000 and had doubled in every year prior.) With some exceptions, I think you’d be hard pressed to describe any business in Manhattan below 59th Street as “mom-and-pop” in the traditional sense, meaning not only independent ownership but also ownership that lives at least in the ballpark of your average freelance journalist’s income bracket. (I, incidentally, make significantly less than this.)

It strikes all of us when we move to New York that these notions of do-good liberalism are the right thing to do, and it’s ironic that the Mudtruck now finds itself  fighting to protect the integrity of its brand and its future business decisions, which is something inherently capitalistic for owners that seem to eschew traditional capitalist values. But what they’ve become are ordinary business people, not greedy capitalist stereotypes, but entrepreneurs smart enough to know they have a brand to protect, and smart enough to see that it might be worth even bigger things.

And I won’t hold it against them; it is a decent cup of coffee.