The Luckin Coffee on the Upper West Side. Photo: Dave Cook / Eating In Translation
For more than four decades, the ground-floor storefront of a 1920s office building on the edge of SoHo sold slices and deli sandwiches to the neighborhood. When its longtime owner retired, the landlord went looking for a very different kind of tenant, and this week it got one: a coffee chain with more than 26,000 stores worldwide, none of which have a cash register.
Luckin Coffee opened Tuesday at 180 Varick Street, where Hudson Square runs into SoHo and the Village. The Chinese chain signed a 10-year lease for the roughly 1,200-square-foot space, which the building’s owner, Olmstead Properties, says had been occupied by a pizzeria and deli for over 40 years before its owner called it a career, according to NYREJ.
To mark the opening, Luckin is offering buy one, get one free on the entire menu through the first week, along with a run of limited-time stickers. The store is open 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. Monday through Friday and 7 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends.
If you haven’t been to a Luckin before, the setup takes a second to get used to. There are no cashiers and no registers. You download the Luckin app, place your order, pay in the app, and pick it up at the counter. Prices generally run below the big-name competition, and the chain has a habit of courting new customers with steep app-only deals.
The menu leans on the brand’s signature lattes, including the Coconut Latte, the Velvet Latte and a Matcha Latte, alongside standard espresso drinks, teas, fruit-forward refreshers and a rotating cast of seasonal specials. The company says its coffee is brewed from beans that have won gold at the International Institute of Coffee Tasters, and its drinks tend to blur the line between coffee and bubble tea, with plenty of fruit, foam and unexpected flavor combinations.
The Varick Street store is the latest stop in a fast Manhattan expansion. Luckin opened its first two U.S. locations in June 2025, one in Greenwich Village near NYU and one in NoMad, and by this spring it had more than 10 across the city, including one on the Upper West Side at Broadway and West 108th Street and another at 41st Street and Lexington Avenue.
Founded in Beijing in 2017, Luckin had more stores in China than Starbucks by 2019, and in 2023 its annual revenue topped what Starbucks pulled in from China. The rise came with a serious detour: in 2020, the company admitted it had inflated its sales figures by as much as $310 million, was delisted from NASDAQ, and filed for bankruptcy protection the following year before emerging in 2022 with new management. Its comeback has been fueled by nonstop product launches, including an alcohol-infused latte made with the Chinese liquor brand Moutai that sold more than 5 million cups on its first day.
As for the building, 180 Varick has been owned by the same family since it went up in the 1920s, and today it’s home to architecture firms, post-production houses, marketing agencies and on-air talent for Disney, whose New York headquarters sits two blocks south. Olmstead says the coffee shop is meant to serve both the office tenants upstairs and everyone else in the neighborhood.
