Oliver Strand

Caffé Vita, a pioneer of Seattle’s independent coffee scene, will open a coffee shop and roaster on the Lower East Side on Monday. The store is tiny by the standards of Caffé Vita — the narrow storefront has room for only a counter and a drink rail — but there’s space enough for a small century-old Gothot roaster in back.

Caffé Vita joins a growing list of notable out-of-town coffee companies setting up shop in New York. Once the gas is turned on, it will be the first of the pack to roast in Manhattan.

The front of the shop is equipped with a la Marzocco GS2 espresso machine that dates to the late 1970s, a workhorse that powered the rise of Seattle coffee. (The GS2 was the machine of choice in the early days of Starbucks.) “We went to a lot of trouble to get that on the bar,” said Mike McConnell, the owner of Caffé Vita. He said the cafe bought the machine from a friend, only “to find out later it wasn’t his to sell.” After some tricky third- and fourth-party transactions, the GS2 made it to Manhattan.

Caffé Vita was founded by Mr. McConnell in 1995, which makes it one of the more senior players in this new generation of coffee. To sketch out a timeline, it opened a year after Alex Rodriguez’s rookie year for the Seattle Mariners, and a year before Modest Mouse released its debut album, “This Is a Long Drive for Someone with Nothing To Think About.”

This is the first Caffé Vita to surface outside of the Pacific Northwest; there are six in Seattle, one in Olympia, Wash., and one in Portland, Ore. (The Lower East Side branch will be next door to the sixth location of Via Tribunali, a pizzeria also owned by Mr. McConnell, where the Naples-style pizzas are fired in a wood-burning oven made with volcanic rock from Mount Vesuvius.) But it won’t be the last: This spring, Caffé Vita will open in the Silver Lake district of Los Angeles, and share an address with two other familiar Seattle names, Rudy’s Barber Shop and Easy Street Records.

In New York, Mr. McConnell is already eyeing expanding to Greenpoint, Brooklyn. A neon sign bearing Caffé Vita’s signature Punchinello logo, newly arrived in Manhattan, might soon be lighting up Brooklyn, too.

Caffé Vita, 124 Ludlow Street, open Monday to Friday 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., Saturday and Sunday 8 a.m. to 7 p.m., 212-260-8482, www.caffevita.com.