Pooja Tripathi, too cool for coffee orders at Brooklyn Coffee Shop

Have you heard of Pooja Tripathi? Unless you’ve been living under a rock, she is the Indian-American actor and writer behind Brooklyn Coffee Shop, the viral Instagram and YouTube sketch series that has turned the familiar ritual of ordering coffee into a weekly theatre of taste, status, self-delusion and moral collapses. It’s 31 degrees in London when I speak to Tripathi, who is in Brooklyn, where the weather has also been behaving with similar dramatic flair. It’s the sort of small-talk opening that could, in another context, become the premise of an episode at the fictional Brooklyn café where she plays Thyme, a barista of immense disdain, alongside DJ Daughtry as Kale, her much taller, equally terrifying co-worker. Together, they serve customers who arrive bearing the spiritual baggage of modern city life, one absurd order at a time.