Who’s afraid of Starbucks? Not this Brooklyn coffee tycoon
Hungry Ghost opened its 5th location this month in Brooklyn and Manhattan
Starbucks was well underway in pursuing its manifest destiny to blanket the world with its coffee shops when Murat Uyaroglu, a Turkish immigrant living in Brooklyn, decided there was room in the business for him too. His angle: he would do it better, from the espresso to the decor. “I saw the game changing,” Uyaroglu says. “Coffee started being treated like wine; it’s special. It’s important where you get it, how you roast it, how you brew it.”
The recipe is working. This month Uyaroglu opened the fifth location of his coffee-bar-and-café chain, Hungry Ghost, on the ground floor of a high-rise apartment building at 80 Dekalb Ave. Set across the street from the LIU Brooklyn campus in Fort Greene, it’s the fourth Hungry Ghost within about a one-mile stretch. (The fifth shop is inside NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts in Manhattan.) By June, Uyaroglu plans to open two more shops in Brooklyn and another in Tribeca. But you can’t convince him he’s expanding too fast.