Old City Coffee is sold after nearly 40 years, and they’ve kept it in the ‘family’

Old City Coffee, believed to be Philadelphia’s earliest microroaster when it opened in 1985 on an alley in the shadow of Christ Church, has been sold.

But it’s being kept in the family, in a manner of speaking.

The new owners are Mittul Patel, 34 — a longtime associate of founder Ruth Isaac and her husband, Jack Treatman — and his fiancee, Amy Zhou, 28. They took over Jan. 19.

“Age is the driver,” said Isaac, 64, who said she and Treatman were “too old at this point to keep doing it because we are not up to date on anything.” She quickly added: “Jack [who is 66] thinks he is and I know I’m not.”

The couple refused to describe this move as a retirement — not that anyone could ever describe the loquacious, hard-charging Isaac as “retiring.”

Isaac and Treatman are sticking around through a transition. “This is a lot of work,” Treatman said. “When you give someone the keys, they have to know how to drive the car.”

» READ MORE: From 2015: Old City Coffee keeps perking along

The idea of a sale had been building for the last six or seven years, Isaac said. “You only have a limited amount of time on earth,” she said. “Jack and I have been trying to build toward handing off.”

They began updating trademarks and standardizing recipes, even looking over the manual to their Probat coffee roaster from 1988. “I’m thinking that thing is going to turn into dust — you better scan it,” Isaac said.

Patel, 34, born in India and raised in Detroit and in small towns across the South, was a graduate student at Drexel University and new to Philadelphia a decade ago. He was on his way to becoming a doctor, when, he said, “I just realized that I don’t like being a doctor.”

He saw a help-wanted sign at Old City’s location at Reading Terminal Market. “I did what I thought was right, which is to go be a barista for a bit until I figured it out,“ he said.

“But I kind of felt that the answer was always in front of me,” Patel said. His parents owned small businesses, such as restaurants and gas stations. He started a company that provided photography and videography to small businesses, and Isaac and Treatman were among his first clients. “We’ve always had a relationship ever since I started working, and they haven’t kicked me out or anything like that,” he said.

Zhou, 28, who worked in retail and later was a health-care consultant in Washington, met Patel nearly seven years ago at a wedding. “When I came to Philly to visit, he took me to a couple of his favorite spots around the city and this cafe, in particular, was one of them,” Zhou said.

“I told her I had to show her the best parts of Philly,” he said.

Even after Patel left Philadelphia for a few years, he said, “I was always somehow involved with Old City, either some photography work or taking up a catering job here and there or something like that.” And when a fire destroyed his belongings and photo equipment, it was Isaac and Treatment who helped him get back on his feet.

Patel is now managing some of his former coworkers. “It’s really interesting because there are a couple of people that are still here,” he said, “but it feels like coming back to a family. That is something that was actually great about the culture that I remember from when I first joined, which is that it’s very close.”

Isaac said she and Treatman called a meeting with Patel and Zhou in 2021 at the cafe. Zhou said they were unsure of the agenda. A sale of the company? “We were like, no, no, no,” Zhou said. “There’s no way. They must have been reaching out about something else.”

Isaac got to the point: “Hey, are you interested in talking about the future of this business?”

“My initial reaction?” Patel said. “It was funny because I don’t know if we’d ever really thought that one day we would have Old City. But as soon as I heard it, I was like, ‘Oh, this seems very much full circle and the perfect thing that I’ve been waiting for, in a way.’ This makes a lot of sense. We have such deep ties to Philadelphia as a city, and I personally have gotten to know a lot of small-business owners in the city and we really enjoy that community. It felt right.”

Philadelphia’s coffee scene in 1985? Nothing much. The first Starbucks and La Colombe shops were a decade away.

Isaac, an Upper Bucks County native whose family business was in manufacturing office furniture, said she was back home after college (Washington University in St. Louis) and was looking to do “something I could really dig my teeth into.”

She remembered an espresso bar from college, and found a 19th-century building on Church Street, paved with Belgian blocks. You look up and a few doors down there’s the spire of Christ Church, the first Episcopal church in the Colonies, where George Washington and Benjamin Franklin had assigned pews. “It was just too picturesque to pass up.”

Isaac bought a roaster — insisting on feeding it Arabica beans sourced from small, family-owned, fair-trade growers and distributors — and a self-service urn that nearly four decades later is still self-service.

Treatman, whose family business was in hosiery and slippers at the next corner, had been watching the place since the windows were papered over. He stopped on the first day, “but he didn’t come back for five months!” Isaac said. “Then he became a regular customer.”

“I always got two coffees,” Treatman said.

“I thought it was for someone else,” Isaac said, “but it was for his father.”

They were married in 1988, the same year that they opened a stall at Reading Terminal. Treatman — who had learned to appreciate good coffee while managing at the old Linton’s chain — became chief roaster. He attended a boot camp run by the Culinary Institute of America and worked at a diner in Princeton and at the White Dog Cafe. At Old City, he said, “I got to fool around with the culinary.”

They stayed small by choice. Two other locations came and went years ago, but they have built a healthy online business.

Old City roasts about 20 varieties of coffee, all but one a dark roast. That won’t change, say Zhou and Patel. Neither will the Probat roaster, which is fully manual and relies on chief roaster Davis Adamson’s eye, ear, and feel.

“We’re learning this ourselves,” Patel said.

Treatman, who said he would miss the 30 employees, said he would try something in the culinary field. “I want a cog-in-a-wheel job,” Isaac said. “Maybe something nice and dry. I think I gravitate toward that kind of stuff. But I have to have fresh coffee, roasted within four days.”