Buunni Coffee, the Ethiopian-rooted roaster that started as a 350-square-foot storefront on Pinehurst Avenue, has landed a new address that would have seemed unthinkable a decade ago: inside Columbia University Irving Medical Center. The Washington Heights company now operates a public café on Haven Plaza and a second, badge-access location inside the William Black Medical Research Building, marking the latest expansion for a business co-founders Elias Gurmu and Sarina Prabasi built from scratch after meeting and marrying in Addis Ababa in 2009.
The medical center location represents the culmination of a 14-year evolution from that tiny Pinehurst Avenue shop into a multi-branch enterprise spanning Northern Manhattan and the South Bronx, according to Columbia Neighbors. Buunni was selected for the campus spot through a formal request-for-proposals process run by Columbia, per the same account. Dennis Scott-Torbet, director of CUIMC campus services, said Buunni embodied the selection committee's goals for welcoming gathering spaces.
From a Harvest Festival Table to a Storefront
Gurmu, who is from Ethiopia, and Prabasi, who had worked in international development, health, education, and safe drinking water, opened their first coffee shop in Northern Manhattan in September 2012 after distributing coffee samples at the Fort Tryon Park Harvest Festival, the Columbia Neighbors report notes. Hurricane Sandy hit the city about six weeks later, an early test for the fledgling shop. Buunni opened a second location in February 2019, per the same account.
Prabasi's résumé extends well beyond the coffee counter. She served as Chief Executive Officer of WaterAid America from May 2014 to September 2019, after earlier leadership roles at Orbis International and a stint as WaterAid's Country Representative in Ethiopia, according to Wikipedia. She has also served on the Board of Directors of the Specialty Coffee Association and was named a Woman of Influence by the New York Business Journal. In April 2019 she published a memoir, The Coffee House Resistance: Brewing Hope in Desperate Times, examining coffee houses as hubs for neighborhood organizing, with proceeds supporting the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights.
Delivering Coffee to Hospitals During the Pandemic
Buunni's path to a hospital campus café traces back to how it responded when the pandemic hit. The company supplied coffee to hospitals and physicians during COVID-19, and Gurmu personally delivered coffee to NewYork-Presbyterian Allen Hospital, CUIMC, Montefiore, the post office, and police stations, the Columbia Neighbors report states. Buunni reopened two locations during the pandemic and kept most of its staff on payroll throughout. That pandemic response, where the founders delivered coffee directly to hospital staff, helped establish the institutional relationships that eventually paved the way for landing the competitive Columbia request-for-proposals account.
Today Buunni employs about 28 part-time and full-time people, including the founders, who own the business equally. The company runs two locations in Washington Heights and Inwood along with a roastery in the South Bronx, and it closed its George Washington Bridge location at some point along the way. Buunni sells packaged coffee at Trader Joe's after a neighborhood Trader Joe's employee who enjoyed the shop's coffee recommended the brand to retail buyers, according to Black Star Reviews.
A South Bronx Roastery Built for Other Small Roasters
Buunni's roasting capacity has grown alongside its retail footprint. In September 2024, the company launched The Roasting Room by Buunni, a 5,000-square-foot co-roastery and education hub at 542 Barretto Street in the South Bronx, equipped with two Loring S35 Kestrel roasters capable of roasting more than 14,000 pounds of coffee beans daily, according to Fresh Cup Magazine. The facility offers co-roasting, toll-roasting, and private-label production alongside a cupping lab meant to expand specialty coffee training for BIPOC and low-income entrepreneurs, as reported by Daily Coffee News. Specialty coffee roasting infrastructure in New York City has traditionally clustered in Brooklyn, while nearby areas have received little investment.
Buunni sources beans from Ethiopia, the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Guatemala, Colombia, and Uganda, and the company visited almost all of its Ethiopian coffee farms in 2025, per Columbia Neighbors. The shops rotate a specialty single-origin coffee each month, with a Dominican Republic light roast currently on the menu alongside a standing Ethiopian macchiato and tea offerings. The name Buunni itself derives from buna, the Amharic word for coffee, referencing traditional Ethiopian coffee ceremonies where freshly roasted beans are brewed in a swan-necked jebna pot and served alongside toasted popcorn, according to Buunni Coffee.
Two Campus Cafés, Two Very Different Access Rules
The new Haven Plaza café sits inside a car-free pedestrian plaza created through the New York City Department of Transportation Plaza Program in partnership with CUIMC, per Columbia Neighbors. That location, at 711 W. 168th St., is open daily from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. and welcomes the general public. The second campus café, tucked inside the William Black Medical Research Building at 650 W. 168th St., keeps weekday hours from 6:45 a.m. to 5 p.m. and requires CUIMC or NYP identification to enter.
The Haven Plaza location has also become a gathering spot beyond coffee, hosting a Sunday stage featuring acoustic music and a Spanish class, alongside a loyalty program for regulars. Buunni will hold a grand opening celebration at the Haven Plaza café on October 6, featuring an Ethiopian coffee ceremony, games, raffles, prizes, tastings, music, complimentary drinks, and menu samples.
A Community That Shows Up
The bond between Buunni and its neighborhood has occasionally taken unusual forms. During a staff retreat, regular customers organized a volunteer shift to run the Washington Heights café so the entire staff could take a collective day off at the beach without closing the store, an anecdote Prabasi shared when reflecting on how neighborhood relationships sustained the coffee shop over its 14-year history, according to an interview posted on YouTube.
Prabasi said the community propelled Buunni Coffee forward, and Gurmu put it simply: home is here. Hoodline previously covered Buunni's Riverdale debut back in 2018, when the brand was still expanding one storefront at a time — a modest starting point for a company that now brews coffee inside one of Manhattan's largest medical campuses.
