Ask Drago Tomianovic for a cup of coffee at Black Crown Collective and he’ll point you to a large pour-over menu and walk you through some of your options.
A light-filled coffee shop with exposed brick is the opposite of what you might expect to find in the middle of the Capitol complex, but that describes Tomianovic’s cafe, which opened in late January. Music plays in the background as patrons sit at the bar, watching him and his staff coax out a range of complex flavors, pouring the water by hand.
Led by Tomianovic and his business partner and co-founder Sam Deur, it’s an expansion of Black Crown’s coffee cart in the Cannon Building basement, which launched last year. The company started as a series of pop-ups around D.C., but when the chance arose to submit a bid for the space in Cannon, they jumped at it.
