Name: Side Practice Coffee
Address: 5139 N Damen Ave, Chicago, IL, 60625
Telephone: (773) 754-8763
Price range: $

Side Practice Coffee

Super GemLincoln Square · Coffee/Cafe Community-sourced, unverified

📍 5139 N Damen Ave, Chicago, IL 60625

Side Practice Coffee calls itself 'a corner cafe that showcases the community's side practices,' and the description undersells how literally true that is — this is less a coffee shop that occasionally hosts a pop-up and more a community hub that happens to serve excellent coffee as its day job.

Ube cold brew and ube-infused drip coffee are the drinks to order, from a cafe that's also an informal incubator for neighborhood Filipino food concepts, including Kanin's original pop-up.

The ube cold brew and ube-infused drip coffee are the drinks worth knowing by name: a small upgrade that turns a regular coffee order into something with real dessert-like sweetness and a genuinely distinctive purple hue, Filipino flavor brought into a format that doesn't usually make room for it. Founded in 2020 by a Filipino owner with an explicit mission to give neighborhood entrepreneurs a stage, Side Practice has become something of an incubator — Kanin, the Filipino-Hawaiian spot that's since opened its own storefront two doors down, got its actual start as a pop-up inside this exact cafe.

That's not a coincidence worth skipping past: order the ube drink, then walk down the block and see what the cafe helped launch next.

Hours

Daily7AM-3PM (per official site; some press cites a shorter 8AM-2PM window -- 7-3 sourced directly from sidepracticecoffee.com)

📅 Reservations not available 🥡 Takeout unconfirmed 📞 (773) 754-8763

Amenities & accessibility

🚶Walk-in only, no reservations

❔Takeout: unverified

❔Wheelchair access: unverified

🙂Kid-friendly

Location

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Side Practice Coffee

Side Practice Coffee calls itself 'a corner cafe that showcases the community's side practices,' and the description undersells how literally true that is — this is less a coffee shop that occasionally hosts a pop-up and more a community hub that happens to serve excellent coffee as its day job.

Specials at Side Practice Coffee