From Texas Barista to Brooklyn Concept Owner: Danny Toro on Rare Coffees, Competition Wins, and Slow Service

Barista in a small Texas town, coffee instructor, AeroPress titleholder, educator in New York, founder of an experimental pop-up: over the past ten years, Danny Toro’s path through the coffee world has taken several unexpected turns. The most recent one is Field Study, a high-end coffee concept that opened in Brooklyn, New York.

The operation sits inside a working car showroom. On weekends, Toro and their business partners serve drinks built on rare and experimental coffees, with prices running from $9 to $25. The idea centers on stillness: even in the middle of New York City’s pace, there is still room to pause, drink slowly, and savor a very special cup.

Toro took a roundabout route to get there. Hailing from a small city outside Austin, Toro became drawn to the science of brewing while studying biology at Texas A&M University. Their subsequent work spanned training and education positions at a number of well-known coffee companies, among them Austin’s Medici Roasting and Greater Goods Coffee Company, plus New York City’s Three Legged Cat. In 2024, Toro won the American AeroPress Championship, which opened up a fresh set of job and brand partnership possibilities.

At World of Coffee in San Diego this year, Toro and their partners came up with Field Study. Only three months later, the concept is up and running and serving paying customers.

We sat down with Toro to talk about how the professional coffee scenes in Austin and New York City differ, what life has been like since becoming American AeroPress Champion, and how far coffee quality (and price) can be pushed.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Tell me about your early coffee career. How did you go from barista in a small Texas town to partner in an experimental coffee concept in New York?

I got my start the way most people do, as a barista at a shop in College Station, Texas. The place was a really small mom-and-pop operation, and they had a Chemex and were doing latte art—things I had never seen in a coffee shop before.

I went there a lot to study, became close with the baristas, and eventually began working there myself. At the time I was at A&M as a biology major, so falling for the science of brewing and extraction came naturally.

After graduating, I chose to stay in coffee, made the leap to Austin, and joined Medici Roasting as their coffee trainer and educator. Taking on that role was nerve-wracking, particularly overseeing seven cafes and training baristas all year. But I really value teaching people, watching baristas develop, and trying to lift them up and empower them. That was probably the most enjoyable part of my career up to that point.

Then I wanted to keep learning, but on a smaller scale, since managing all those cafes was a lot. So I moved to Greater Goods Coffee Co., which had a training position and was an SCA Premier Training Campus. I took all the SCA classes there, and soon afterward I was teaching public classes for the first time. That was scary too, but it was great to teach people who were simply curious about coffee. The part that mattered most was helping them grasp the differences between processes, between light and dark roasts, and then watching them leave excited, saying, “I can brew coffee at home now by myself.” Sometimes they’d come back to the shop and share notes on what they’d been trying. That was really wholesome.

After that I moved to New York. I simply wanted the chance to learn something different, something I perhaps didn’t understand yet.

Why New York in particular?

I had always wanted to live there, and I had looked into it as an option for a while. At the time there weren’t many training roles in Austin, so I wanted to find more educational opportunities elsewhere. I also wanted to be near brands like Onyx Coffee Lab, La Cabra, or Black Fox Coffee—companies that are operating on another level.

But New York was very different from Austin. Just the volume of everything. My first shop was in Rockefeller Center, and I never stopped once. One mistake set everyone back. Your technical skills sharpen fast, no question.

What else sets the New York City coffee scene apart from Austin?

Everyone is very competitive. I felt like I had to relearn how things were done and how companies operated. New York has a lot of talented baristas, and I was constantly trying to keep up. Austin is competitive in its own way, but New York leans much more heavily on latte art. I went to my first latte art throwdown there and everyone in the first round was pouring swans. I was like, I can barely do a swan. Okay, time to brush up.

The pace is part of the culture too. Everyone wants to grab their latte and go. Some places try to cultivate something more, but at the end of the day, people are trying to get from point A to point B. In Austin you can have a genuine connection with your barista. Everything slows down a bit. There’s more time for the hospitality side of things.

What drew you to compete in the AeroPress Championship?

At the time, AeroPress was my brewer of choice at home. I used it pretty regularly. Then I used it as part of my U.S. Brewers Cup routine in 2023 and placed really well with it. So I thought, if I can do well with this in Brewers Cup, maybe I have a shot at the AeroPress competition. I wasn’t expecting much. I entered for fun, and it ended up going really well.

How did winning affect you?

It was really strange. I was working at a cafe in East Williamsburg called Three Legged Cat, just brewing coffee on the bar, and people would come in and ask for an AeroPress. International visitors had specifically come in to try my AeroPress. I felt immense pressure. I thought, you guys came all the way here for this? So I put an AeroPress on the menu for anyone who wanted to come try it. I met a lot of baristas through that. Even when I traveled, baristas would recognize me. That was really weird.

The other thing was being able to collaborate with brands more. This past April I got to work with Sibarist. I’ve been using their coffee filters since I started competing in Brewers Cup in 2023. It felt like a full-circle moment where I thought, I used your filters as a baby barista, and now I’m here representing you. Overall, winning brought more recognition for my craft, and the chance to work with other brands and pick up guest shifts in different places.

How did Field Study come together?

It came out of nowhere, honestly. The conversation started at World of Coffee this year. I’m really good friends with one of the co-owners, Leeor Waisbrod, who owns Three Legged Cat. The other co-owner is Norberto Peña from Obscure Coffee Roasters, a Latin-owned roaster that focuses on Latin American coffees. I’d gotten to know him through coffee cuppings and just running in the same circles.

Before World of Coffee, they came to me and said, “Hey, we have this concept, we want to create something elevated for guests, and you’re the first person we thought of.” I wasn’t really doing anything at that moment, so I said yes.

We wanted to create something like a tasting room experience—more focused on slowing down. People come in and just sit and enjoy a cup of coffee for 20 minutes to an hour without rushing out. Because with New York, everything is to-go. And coffee should be enjoyed slowly. That’s something I learned through competition, knowing that coffee changes from when it’s warm to when it’s cool. So Field Study is designed around that idea. We don’t do to-go cups at all. Only for-here cups.

We’ve also been playing around with signature drinks. We have freeze-distilled milk on the menu. We have a cascara fizz—that was my recipe, and I brought it to the shop. And we source competition-level coffees from roasters we really believe in, like Standout Coffee in Sweden, Blank Space out of California, and some local roasters as well. We’ll sometimes have the same coffee from two different roasters and let guests compare how they each roasted it. The bar has seating, and if you sit there, we’ll walk you through what you’re tasting. Recently we’ve added coffee experiences: You come in, you get a welcome drink, we pull you an espresso and a pour-over, and then you get a signature. It’s really fun.

What do you charge for these high-end coffees?

Our prices range from $9 for an espresso to about $25 for some of the rarer coffees. We try to have flexibility for everyone. But I do want coffee to eventually be priced the way a cocktail or a glass of wine is priced. People have been surprised by what we charge, but they’ve also been buying it. We sold a gesha espresso for $18 and people were ordering it. That tells you something.

What equipment do you use?

We have a La Marzocco GS3 and a Decent Espresso machine that we profile on. The GS3 handles our standard espresso featuring Obscure Coffee, and the Decent is for the specialty espressos, the rarer, more dialed-in stuff.

Is Field Study intended to become something more permanent eventually?

Right now we’re operating as a pop-up inside a car showroom and garage space in Brooklyn. We’re there Friday through Monday. The space has been there for about a year, and the owner wanted to do something with it, reached out to our partner from Obscure, and that’s how the connection happened. Sometimes there are still car shows in the space while we’re there, which has been a new experience for me.

Long-term, the goal is a brick-and-mortar of our own. Right now we’re just seeing if this concept can actually work in New York. A slow bar is something you see more commonly in tea, but coffee is treated differently. So we’re trying to push that.

What else are you working on these days?

I’m competing in the Origami Cup in Houston on August 1. I’m really excited about it because I used an Origami brewer in my first Brewers Cup, so it feels like a full-circle moment. I’ve been reconnecting with that brewing style and asking myself: How much have I actually learned since then? What new techniques can I bring to it now? I have a teal Origami that I pulled out of a box, and I’m just going to brew again.