Every city has a coffee shop that shows up on every list, and it's usually fine — crowded, a little rushed, worth doing once. The better version of a City Slicker morning skips it. Walk two extra blocks, pick whichever place has three tables and nobody in a hurry, and order the simplest thing on the board. The point isn't the coffee. It's the twenty minutes of sitting still before a city day gets loud.
This is the whole argument for City Slicker Black specifically — not the daytime skyline version, but the one for slower hours, early enough that the mesh back is still catching a genuinely cold morning instead of afternoon heat. A cap that reads a little more considered than a baseball cap, worn somewhere that isn't trying to prove anything.
A good travel coffee habit is really a scheduling habit: build in the twenty minutes on purpose, rather than hoping they show up between other plans.
If you're doing this in New York specifically: go early enough that the light is still low and gold off the glass towers, somewhere in a neighbourhood you haven't fully mapped yet. Skip the queue-around-the-block spot. The unremarkable café with good light and no line is doing more for the actual trip.
None of this needs planning beyond showing up slightly earlier than feels necessary. The reward is a slow twenty minutes in a city that doesn't usually offer them.
