Baby's Coffee

Baby's Coffee is named after a building it left behind. Gary and Olga Teplitsky came down from New York in 1991 to start a coffee roasting company, and opened in a small place at the uptown end of Duval Street in Key West. By the company's own account, a Cuban family had owned that building back in the 1920s and called it Baby's Place, after their youngest son, who grew up to run a cantina in it. That story appears in no record outside the business's own telling, which is worth saying plainly, but the Teplitskys liked the name enough to keep it. Within a few years the roastery had outgrown Duval Street and moved out here to Mile Marker 15, on Saddlebunch Keys, about fifteen miles up the highway from the building the name came from. The company roasts arabica on site and ships it nationally, and calls itself the southernmost coffee roaster in America, which is difficult to argue with this far down the chain. It is also the only coffee roaster in the Florida Keys. The stop has become a fixture for cyclists on the Overseas Heritage Trail, who leave their cars here and ride the ten miles into Key West and back. Joe and Carnella Bracciale bought the business in 2024 and are opening a second shop on Fleming Street in Old Town, a block off Duval, which puts Baby's back within sight of where it started.