Blast from the future: Panoramica coffee shop lands in Peconic

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The North Fork ain’t seen anything like this before.

Amid the scenic wineries and farmstands that dot Long Island’s Wine Country, a splash of retro-futuristic color has appeared in the form of Panoramica, a new coffee shop in Peconic that feels like it was beamed straight out of a 1960s sci-fi flick.

Imagine walking into a place with a rotary telephone, a vintage jukebox that oozes out Elvis gospel tunes and a mini NASA control panel that lets you listen to the moon landing— all while you sip your morning brew. Welcome to the bold new frontier of three local entrepreneurs who decided the sleepy hamlet of Peconic needed a java-infused jolt of Jetsons-style whimsy.

“It’s a lot of fun. Customers of all ages have a good time,” said Trevor Zurawski, 31, the baby of the three-member ownership team. He and his partners, Generation X couple Ian Wile and Rosalie Runga, are already North Fork food scene veterans with Little Creek Oysters in Greenport and the Sunshine Shack at Orient State Park under their belts.

But Panoramica, which took flight on New Year’s Day right next door to the Peconic post office on Peconic Avenue, is their most eye-popping venture yet.

The café’s design wasn’t just a random flight of fancy. Turns out, the location has some transportation history baked right in.

“There used to be a stop here for the train that ended in the early 1970s,” Zurawski explained. “We thought about this spot, so close to the tracks, as if it was this depot café and took it back to its heyday before the stop got canceled. We focused on the ’50s and ’60s.”

From that seed grew a meticulous exercise in period-specific design that would make “Mad Men” visionary Don Draper go weak in the knees.

“We spent over a month and a half or so looking through Pinterest and other places for inspiration and shapes and colors. All that stuff,” Zurawski said. “We developed a deep-dive collection of about 25, 30 different shapes for booths and designs.”

Ricky Teevee’s whimsical touch

If Panoramica is a stage set for midcentury modern dreams, then local designer and artist Ricky Teevee is its master set decorator. His fingerprints — imaginative and physical — are on every surface of the space.

“Everything was built by Ricky — and he brought so many ideas to the table as well,” Zurawski notes with obvious pride, gesturing toward what might be the shop’s most Instagram-worthy feature: two futuristic one-person booths with curvy cutouts that look like they belong on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise.

Each booth sports a flying saucer-shaped light fixture that casts a soft glow, a small stool and table, and—the pièce de résistance — an actual 1960s-style, tabletop phone (one is rotary, the other push button). The booths have become selfie central, Zurawski beamed.

“Everyone comes and sits in here and checks it out,” he said of the booths. “They take a picture … Kids are in there playing with the phones.”

Gizmos and gadgets aplenty

Zurawski proudly detailed his coffee shop’s interactive elements, designed to transport customers to a different time and place.

“A lot of it is experience-based and that’s the direction we headed on the build to start,” he said. “The aesthetic and the feel is a very ’50s, mid-century space age, all kind of combined into what people during that time thought the future would look like.

“We took that approach with our design. So there are gizmos and gadgets that speak to you, listen to you, interact with you,” Zurawski continued. “It’s as much a science experiment in a lot of places as it is architectural design.”

The crown jewel of these interactive elements is a mini-NASA control panel complete with a phone that plays a continuous loop of the moon landing.

“You pick up this phone, you can listen to it and it’s actually giving a full recording of the moon landing,” Zurawski explained, sounding a bit like a pre-teen showing off his coolest toy.

Above the NASA-like feature is a vintage black-and-white Zenith 12-inch television, sourced from a Pennsylvania shop called Chromium. It plays a video loop of old commercials, newsreels, shows and advertisements, creating a nostalgic soundtrack that accompanies the soft sounds of the 1950s jukebox across the room.

The jukebox, oh by the way, came from local mechanic Billy Hands in Orient, acquired through what Zurawski described as “a handshake deal.”

“He was generous enough to give it to us. He said if you can get it out, it’s yours,” Zurawski recalled with a laugh. Now retrofitted with Bluetooth while keeping its original speakers, the jukebox plays tunes from “between the ’40s and the ’60s in a variety of genres.”

“It makes it sound like you’re walking into a time capsule,” he added.

Fun Fact: Billy Hands’ dad, the late-Bill Hands Jr., pitched in the Major Leagues for 11 seasons and was a 20-game winner with the Chicago Cubs in 1969.

Even the bathroom — many times a coffee shop afterthought — offers a mind-bending experience, thanks to the theremin attached to the sink. Whenever your hands go near it, the unique energy wave fixture hums. Zurawski said it “takes your energy output as a human and produces the sound your energy provides.”

Beyond the flash

For all its bells and whistles, Zurawski insisted that Panoramica is first and foremost a functioning coffee shop, The shop’s coffee comes courtesy of a partnership with North Fork Moto, and it features the Greenport roast, which Zurawski described as “mainly a Central and South American blend that’s on the medium to darker side. Really smooth.”

The menu ventures beyond liquid caffeine to include what Zurawski called “health forward” breakfast and lunch options — open-faced toasts, paninis and smoothies. Meanwhile, the retail section features carefully curated products that serve two functions: they match the store’s retro-futuristic aesthetic while offering something genuinely different from what’s available elsewhere in the area.

“All the retail that we have kind of matches the aesthetic,” Zurawski said. “The quality is super high. Producers are generally small, so the ingredients are really high quality, but they’re also just really fun products that you don’t find in the supermarkets.”

Since popping their cork Jan. 1, Panoramica has become something of an Instagram darling, with fun coverage posted by a bevy of social media influencers.

“This place was built for social media,” Zurawski admits with zero apology. “There’s angles for shots everywhere.”

Currently open Wednesday through Sunday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Panoramica plans to expand its operating hours and days on April 1. Its proximity to Jean Cochran and Tasker parks — both are within a half-mile — ensures a steady flow of potential customers year-round, though Zurawski anticipates the typical summer explosion that characterizes North Fork businesses.

In a region where vineyards, breweries and farmstands hold court, Panoramica offers something that feels both refreshingly innovative and nostalgically futuristic — a playful, immersive trip to a future that never quite materialized, served up with a side of delicious coffee. It’s quickly become a must visit on trips to Long Island’s Wine Country.

As Zurawski put it, reflecting on how the curved design elements that transformed the once-boxy space: “It gives this perception as if it’s larger… It just has a very different feel than I anticipated.”

In other words, this ain’t your grandpa’s coffee shop. Unless of course your grandfather happened to be a set designer for “2001: A Space Odyssey.”