Dance-Inspired Lattes
My local coffee shop on the Upper West Side serves a highly unusual latte.
Called "Waltz of the Flowers," it's a matcha latte with oat milk that includes highly floral accent syrups (lavender, rose, and vanilla). The drink comes out a soft green and it tastes exactly like you’d imagine to drink up a cup of blossoms in a blooming springtime garden.
When I asked the barista how he came up with the drink, he smiled and told me that he hadn't come up with it at all. That drink, just like the other two on the Specials menu were dreamed up by the dance company across the street, Steps on Broadway.
"What an unlikely combination," I said. "How did that come about?"
He told me that as a dancer himself, he came up with the idea to inject a little bit of something new into the menu. After hearing interest from creative combinations from dancers who frequented the cafe, he came up with an intriguing idea.
The barista brought an armful of cafe-style ingredients (syrups, milks, etc.) to the dance studio. He left them and invited the dance company to come up with whatever recipe combinations inspired them.
Left with only that prompt, they came up with two drinks entirely on their own (names included): The Waltz of the Flowers, and the Saute Cabriole Latte. They also offered a name for a lemonade drink the barista had conceptualized himself. They now call it, A Five, Six, Lemon-Eight.
You can see all of these drinks on their specials menu here:
Leaning Into Mash-Ups
What I love about this story is how it shows the magic of unlikely combinations.
If you don't have a background in dance, you'd probably never think to ask the dance company across the street to help create new menu ideas. But when you come from an interdisciplinary background, you see hidden possibilities others might miss.
The end result not only delights customers, but connects the community through shared buy-in and a feeling of ownership, and leaving their mark on the coffee these dancers likely visit the most.
These invisible third options start to become a lot more obvious the more you look at problems from a diverse mindset. That's one of the most valuable byproduct of adopting an entrepreneurial mindset, no matter whether you work at a cafe, a dance studio, or a startup.
