NY Coffee Cup | Fun Facts

The Anthora was the first of its kind, introducing the to-go coffee cup as we know it, the first handleless paper to-go coffee cup, innovating a basic design that nearly all coffee shops have come to use since. New Yorkers needed coffee, and the Greek diner or deli was where they were getting it. As the first disposable cup without obtrusive handles, it was a matter of convenience for a population known for being on the go.

When Greek immigrants arrived in New York in the early part of the last century, they brought their coffee culture along with them, giving birth to the city’s ubiquitous Greek diners and sidewalk pushcarts. In 1963, the Sherri Cup Company set out to produce a to-go coffee cup that would appeal to the Greek vendors. For decades afterwards, hundreds of millions of the cups were manufactured in Sherri’s huge brick factory along the Mattabesset River in the Kensington section of Berlin, Connecticut.

Leslie Buck, an employee in the company’s marketing department (himself an immigrant and Holocaust survivor from Czechoslovakia), was given the task of selling the cups to Greek vendors. At first, there was no luck for Mr. Buck. But then he decided to design a cup that would remind the Greeks of their home country, and the blue and white WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU cup was born.

Mr. Buck, had no formal design training but did a tremendous amount of research on Greek culture prior to settling on the look. He dreamed up a motif that included blue-and-white colors from the flag of Greece. His message, WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU, was printed in Greek-style letters, adorned with a trio of steaming, mustard-yellow cups, flanked by ancient “Anthora” urns, and framed with a Greek Key pattern.

The “Anthora,” as he called it, immediately became a huge success, Buck himself, as a Czech immigrant, and it has been said that “Anthora” was actually his thick Eastern European accented pronunciation of the word “Amphora,” the ancient Greek urn. With the urn’s image as part of the design, the cup became known as the “Anthora cup.”

A New York Times writer described the motto WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU as having “welcome intimations of tenderness, succor and humility.”

Just as Buck suspected, the Anthora cup was a big hit with New York’s Greek coffee peddlers and it reached an astonishing 500 million sold in 1994. No one, before or since, has been able to capture, by accident or design, the city’s self-identity. Some have called the Anthora a pop-culture ephemeral emblem, as recognizable as the Statue of Liberty. Coffee in an Anthora was the holy grail of Midtown.

For years, if you ordered a coffee to-go at any deli, bagel stand, or diner, Greek or not, this is what you’d get. The Anthora became a quintessential symbol of New York City, as much a part of the city’s culture as the Chrysler building, the yellow cab and the bagel. Millions more around the world recognize it from cameos on TV shows and movies. It has even graced the cover of the Manhattan telephone book.i n 1994, up to 500 million were sold to business-owners and consumers were estimated to use as many as 15 million cups in a single month.

About a decade later, the Solo Company (yes, Solo Company of those famous red plastic frat party cups) absorbed Sherri and eventually phased out the Anthora cup as many Greek immigrants starting leaving the City for the suburbs.

Buck never made royalties from his design, but as a salesman he was well-remunerated for the success of the product. When he retired from Sherri Cup Co. in 1992, he was presented with 10,000 Anthoras printed with a testimonial inscription: “It was our pleasure to serve you.”

The Anthora coffee cup continues to be featured in movies and television shows that are set in New York such as Goodfellas, The Sopranos, Nurse Jackie, Archer, Brooklyn 99, NYPD Blue, Suits, Friends, Men in Black, How I Met Your Mother, Succession, the Law & Order franchise, Marvel’s Daredevil, and Flight of the Conchords. The cup has been filmed in the hands of Leonardo DiCaprio, Jon Hamm, Tommy Lee Jones, Al Pacino, Robert DeNiro, Clive Owen, Harvey Keitel, Nicholas Cage, Sandra Bullock, and many others.

In fact, the design was so important to the aesthetic of NYC that production designer Bob Shaw used it to help convey a convincing '90s-era NYC atmosphere for The Wolf of Wall Street. It’s no wonder that television show characters are often shown drinking coffee from an Anthora cup in New York City, whether they’re on the street or at work. When the Anthora cup appears on the screen, it sends an immediate, if subconscious, signal that the characters are in New York City.

One New York Times writer in 1995 called the Anthora “perhaps the most successful cup in history.” The New York Post once dubbed these cups as one of “the 10 things that are the essence of New York City.” Inspired by “A History of the World in 100 Objects,” the British Museum’s BBC radio series recruited historians and museum curators to identify 50 objects that could embody the narrative of New York.

For years, the Standard Hotel in Hollywood provided Anthora cups for the free coffee in the lobby. You could relax on the beige Ligne Roset Togo sofa and sip coffee while listening to electronic music.

After New York Senator Hillary Clinton was tapped as Secretary of State, the State Department ordered 10,000 Anthora cups for a welcoming gala dinner.

Millions of these cups had fed the caffeine addictions of New Yorkers during all those years. The sheer number of them coupled with their forty-year history has given the cup icon status along with the yellow taxis and the Statue of Liberty. However, by 2007 the cup was mentioned in passing in a New York Times television review as “one of those endangered artifacts.” Solo discontinued the original cup as a stock item as Starbucks and other popular coffee house franchises began replacing diners as the take-out morning stop for coffee lovers.

The Anthora cup continued to live on in other products: ceramic mug versions, coin purses, cufflinks and watches.

Without the original cup, knock-offs began to appear. The impostors are convincing, and fairly indistinguishable from the original without a side-by-side comparison: blue cups with cheap Grecian motifs and phrases like WE ARE PLEASED TO SERVE YOU, or SERVICE IS OUR SPECIALTY, nearing without quite hitting the mark of the original, WE ARE HAPPY TO SERVE YOU, in a Hercules-esque Greek font. The NY Times conducted an interview with a sculptor who was collecting all the versions, claiming he viewed them as an “art form that is tattooed to the body of New York.”

Oscar Wilde said, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” Other unauthorized variations on the Anthora include depictions of the Parthenon, a discus-thrower, a harpist, and a woman bathing a nude man from a golden jug. The symbol of New York City lifestyle has inspired countless copycats, which makes finding a real Anthora cup a priceless city experience.

Historically, the paper cup used materials from a relatively unregulated network of paper product suppliers. Now, industry leaders such as Solo source paper from suppliers who have received certification from the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), a nonprofit created by the timber industry to encourage compliance with state and federal laws regulating the trade.

Until now, the original Anthora has not been available for purchase. In the past, the cup was only sold to restaurants, coffee shops, diners, commissaries, food carts and other establishments. But thanks to NYCoffeeCup.com, “The One and Only, Genuine, Original New York Coffee Cup” has been rescued from near extinction and survives as an iconic symbol of New York City daily life.